


Things Can Only Get Better

by OverTheMoon322



Series: Stronger Together [3]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Bullying, Canon-Typical Violence, Coming Out, Elements of Season 3, Eleven | Jane Hopper & Maxine "Max" Mayfield Friendship, Gay Will Byers, Good Friend Robin Buckley, Good Parent Joyce Byers, Humor, Lesbian Robin Buckley, M/M, Maxine "Max" Mayfield is a Good Friend, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-Season/Series 02, Protective Steve Harrington, Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington Friendship, Teenage Drama, Will Byers Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-28
Updated: 2020-08-15
Packaged: 2020-09-29 12:00:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 53,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20435666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OverTheMoon322/pseuds/OverTheMoon322
Summary: School becomes an increasingly hostile environment for Will and Robert as rumors continue to spread about them concerning the events of Jennifer Hayes' Halloween party. While some friends are lost, others are gained. Lucas must make a choice after he discovers his friend and teammate Todd Phillips isn't who he thought he was. Romantically confused and tired of being taken for granted, Max takes some time off for herself. Steve decides to make a move with Robin after hearing of Dustin's success with Jennifer. Meanwhile Robin learns she's not alone.Follow-up to "Crossfire" in the Stronger Together series.





	1. The Practice

I didn’t know it at the time, but Max was royally pissed off at me. Not just for how much crap I gave her on Halloween night, but for how much I had taken her for granted the entirety of last month. It had been without a second thought that she stayed by my side after I had broken up with Will at the end of September, that she had eaten lunch with me every day. Other than Dustin, who I seldom saw outside of biology class anymore, Max had been the only friend for the entire month of October who knew exactly what I was going through. Jack didn’t know squat. Max and I had both kept him in the dark. When we started sitting with him at lunch, it was under the pretense of wanting a cross country teammate only table, since all of Jack’s other friends were conveniently also on the team. At one point during the past month he asked why we didn’t hang out with the rest of the party anymore, and Max lied that she and Mike had a falling out just to cover up the truth that I had broken up with Will and wanted to avoid his lunch table. Max was unquestionably as loyal as they come. But I had been too up my own ass to appreciate that.

Today was the first day of November and the first day of our three-day weekend. Will and I had spent some much needed quality time together down at Lovers Lake to kick off the weekend. Both of us had a lot of catching up to do after a whole month apart. After last night’s Halloween party shenanigans, Hopper grounded El for the entire weekend as punishment for using her powers in a reckless and potentially exposing manner. Mike was stuck all day long in dress rehearsals for the fall play, so Max came to the rescue and snuck El out to the Starcourt Mall for a boy-free day, which Max herself desperately needed.

Although it was a Friday, it was still the middle of the day, so the mall wasn’t nearly as crowded as it would get on weekends. The girls’ first stop was The Gap, where El helped Max pick out a white marled turtleneck sweater that she subsequently bought with her saved up allowance money. The two left the store with their arms interlocked, their faces beaming with delight. Although El saw many things she might have wanted and even tried on a few of them, she didn’t end up buying anything, preferring not to have any evidence of her clandestine trip to the mall. _Next time_, she told herself. Still, she was more than happy to be there helping keep Max distracted from “stupid boys.”

They then went into JC Penny and found the sunglasses section.

“You should get a pair,” Max suggested.

El gave her a confused look. “Why? It’s not summer anymore.”

“So people don’t recognize you when you’re sneaking out like this. It’s like the perfect disguise. Plus, they make you look like ten times cooler.”

The brunette shrugged. “I guess I could try on a few pairs.”

“Try these,” Max handed El a pair of Jackie O shades like the pair Heather Holloway always wore as a lifeguard at the Hawkins Community Pool.

El put them on and looked in the nearby mirror. She shook her head. “Too big.”

She proceeded to try on no less than twenty pairs of varying style and shade and frame colors before finally settling on a pair of aviators with a silver frame and mirrored lenses. 

“Bitchin’,’” El muttered softly as she admired her choice in the mirror.

“Nice choice,” Max nodded and smiled with approval. “You look kind of like your dad… in a good way,” she tried to save face.

El smiled faintly at Max’s awkward compliment. “If I buy them..."

Max raised an eyebrow. "_If _you buy them"?

"Yeah. _If_ I buy them," she reiterated, "could you keep them at your place for a while? I don’t want Papa to find them lying around.”

“Yeah sure, of course,” the redhead agreed.

Max's promise to keep them safe for her pushed El over the edge. No longer able to resist the temptation to splurge, El used up almost her whole allowance to pay for her expensive new sunglasses, but she knew they were worth it, and Max certainly agreed.

The pair excitedly hurried over to Scoops Ahoy for a treat, shopping bags in tow. Robin Buckley was behind the counter, in her usual sailor getup of a uniform with a blue and white striped blouse with an oversized white collar with red striped lining and red ascot, a blue open vest, and matching blue shorts with two white stripes at the leg openings. And of course over her light brown locks was the white sailor hat with the word “Ahoy” embroidered in blue, which was a required part of the uniform as per company policy, much to her co-worker Steve’s chagrin. The high school senior looked at them wearily, noticing the girls’ beaming faces. “You two’re looking extra giddy today,” Robin remarked. She perked up as she noticed Max’s new haircut. Max had cut her hair to look like Molly Ringwald in _The Breakfast Club_ not only because she had gone as her character for Halloween last night, but also because she had felt like changing her hair up from her usual long locks. Her shorter style also had the added benefit of being easier to run with. “Whoa, Max! You cut your hair! I’m digging the new look!”

Max blushed. “Thanks.”

“You want me to call Steve out from the back?” She had become accustomed to telling Steve his “kids are here” anytime someone from the party showed up since the mall first opened.

They both shook their heads. “We’re having another girls’ day,” El explained.

“Oh what I’d give to have one of those right now,” Robin sighed. “So much for the three-day weekend.”

“Why are you still working here anyway, Robin?” Max questioned her. “I thought this was just supposed to be a summer job?”

Robin laughed dryly. “Because once I graduate, I’m gonna need all the money I can get so I can get as far away from this lame-ass town as I can.”

“I’m going back to California for college,” Max proclaimed. “I miss the beaches.”

“They’re like totally tubular, right?” El teased her, trying to imitate the way Dustin and Lucas always said it.

Max exhaled sharply. “Yeah, El. They _are_ totally tubular, actually,” she replied, laughing a bit.

Robin chuckled. “All right, what are we having today? Did either of you wanna sample anything?”

Max shook her head. “No thanks. I’ll take the usual. Strawberry on a sugar cone.”

“Can I have dark chocolate on a waffle cone?” El requested.

“Coming right up,” Robin said, her lips curling into a smile.

Once Robin finished scooping their ice cream, the girls paid for their frozen treats (El having just enough to cover the cost), said their goodbyes to the high school senior and walked away, cones in hand.

“We should hang out with her more. She’s really nice,” El suggested as they walked by the booths in front of Scoops Ahoy.

“Yeah, and really cool too,” Max added. “Just wish she had more free time, you know?”

El froze and put her free hand out in front of Max to prevent her from moving forward. “Max, look.”

Max glanced over at the nearby booth El was pointing at. Sitting in it was a group of teenage girls around their age sipping on milkshakes. “Well, well, well. If it isn’t Stacey and her curly haired clones,” Max snarked, recognizing her classmates.

“They were at the party last night. They’re Jennifer’s friends,” El reminded her.

“Well, it doesn’t look like she’s with them now,” Max pointed out.

El noticed she was right. There was no sign of Jennifer. “I wonder what they’re talking about.”

“Wanna find out?” Max grinned devilishly.

El’s lips curled into a smile. She knew it was wrong, but she had to admit there was a certain thrill to eavesdropping, one she and Max had experienced when they used El’s powers to spy on Mike, Lucas, Will and me earlier in the summer that day she dumped Mike. The two girls slipped over to a nearby booth and poked their heads over the brass horizontal bar on top to spy on Stacey and company. Both girls slipped on their sunglasses for extra stealth and extra cool.

“What was up with Jennifer’s party last night?” they overheard one of the girls named Katie ask her friends. Katie had pale skin, long reddish hair that was teased up and partially held up with a blue scrunchie, and a nose that pointed slightly upwards.

“They’re talking about the Halloween party,” El whispered to Max.

Max shushed her.

“Yeah, weirdest party ever,” another girl named Alice replied. She had teased dirty blonde hair swept backwards and thick eyebrows. Her large plastic hoop earrings stuck out through her thick locks. “And Jennifer wouldn’t even hang out with us. She kept like, running off and stuff.”

“I don’t know. I thought it was pretty phat… at least before the lights went out,” a black girl named Donna with shorter dark curly hair that just reached the bottom of her neck.

Stacey rolled her eyes. “Oh, gag me with a spoon. Her party already sucked before the lights went all crazy. Way too many dweebs and nobodies running around. I mean who invited Toothless anyway? Like eww.”

El and Max cringed at Stacey’s insult toward Dustin.

“Your boyfriend sure made a scene calling those fairies out in front of everyone,” Alice commented.

“He’s not my boyfriend, Alice. We’re on a break,” a mildly irritated Stacey reminded the blonde.

“Sorry, it’s so hard to keep track these days,” Alice replied snidely.

“Wasn’t one of those fairies Zombie Boy?” Donna wondered.

Katie’s face scrunched in confusion. “Wait, isn’t Zombie Boy who Jennifer’s been crushing on for like months?”

“Yeah,” Stacey confirmed. “And honestly, I’m not even surprised he turned out to be a fairy. Him and that taller boy with the ugly mole next to his nose. Robert, I think that’s his name.”

“You have a mole next to your nose,” Donna reminded her.

“It’s a beauty mark, and it’s on my cheek, you bimbette!” Stacey snapped at her. She took a moment to compose herself. “Poor Jennifer, all that time chasing after a fairy. If you ask me, she’s lucky she didn’t catch HIV. I heard if you kiss someone carrying it, you get it too.”

“Oh eww,” the other girls said, all of them looking repulsed.

“Didn’t she say she kissed him?” Katie recalled.

“Wouldn’t someone need to have given Zombie Boy the disease first?” Donna asked, somewhat skeptical of this whole idea.

“You know they never did say what exactly happened to him when he went missing a couple years back,” Stacey said. “Just that he got ‘lost in the woods.’ Sounds like they’re covering up something real grody if you ask me. Who knows? Maybe some perv kidnapped him and gave him HIV, and his family and the police kept it all quiet.”

“Then Jennifer could have it too?” Alice wondered.

“I don’t know. Why don’t you swap spit with her and find out?” Stacey teased the blonde. The other two girls giggled in response, while Alice grimaced at the thought of making out with her friend.

El and Max stared loathingly at the four girls in the booth, practically foaming at the mouths. “How can they say such horrible things about people they don’t even know? About their own friend?” El whispered.

“Because they’re horrible people, obviously,” Max whispered back.

“Jennifer deserves better than them…. better than me,” El lamented, feeling more guilty than ever about lying to her about Will.

“No, if Jennifer doesn’t wanna be your friend anymore, that’s her loss, not yours,” Max comforted her. “Hey, you know what will make you feel better?”

El gently shook her head, waiting for Max to continue.

“Make Stacey’s milkshake explode on her like you did to her Orange Julius that first time we came here together over the summer.”

El gave her a surprised look.

“C’mon, El. I promise it’ll still be just as hilarious the second time.”

El smiled faintly. She began to stare intensely at Stacey’s milkshake glass. She then quickly cocked her head up. Stacey squealed as her mocha chip milkshake exploded all over her face and clothes. Katie, who was sitting next to her, was also caught in the splash zone.

Max and El covered their mouths to suppress their laughter.

All four girls’ mouths were agape. Alice was the first to shrug off the initial shock and speak. “Why does that keep happening to you?”

Stacey just glared at her friend, furious that her face, hair and clothes were all covered in milkshake.

Max and El inconspicuously slipped away booths and out of Scoops Ahoy, howling with laughter once they were in the clear.  
______________________________________________________________________________

A bit later, the two were walking through the mall aimlessly, their cones now on their last legs.

“In the spirit of this awesome girls’ day we’re having, I’ve officially decided I’m not going to practice today,” Max declared before taking her last bite of her cone.

“Max! You’re such a rebel!” El grinned.

“Says the girl sneaking around the mall while grounded blowing her allowance on bitchin' shades and exploding people’s milkshakes!” Max said with a smirk. They both giggled. Max looked at her wrist watch. “Hey, it’s getting late. We should probably go catch the next bus so you can get home in time for Hopper.”

The brunette nodded as she finished her cone. They made their way out the sliding doors and toward the bus stop, arms interlocked, sunglasses on.  
______________________________________________________________________________

After I parked my bike at the high school’s bike rack, clad in my navy blue running shorts and Hawkins High green hoodie, I ran my fingers through my hair, pushing my bangs to the side. I had no idea what to expect out of practice today, since I wasn’t sure who knew about last night and who didn’t. I knew Phillip, Other Steve and Tim weren’t at Jennifer’s Halloween party. And Jack had been completely out of it by the time Will and I reunited with El, Mike, Max and Dustin outside on the sidewalk. Additionally, there was no school today, so it was less likely that rumors would have spread so rapidly. Still, I couldn’t help but worry.

I walked briskly over to the track, where our team met up every day for practice. Since I hadn’t been in school, I didn’t feel the need to go change in the locker room and had just shown up in my running clothes. And maybe that was for the better, since if people did know, they might feel uncomfortable changing near me.

It was 3:05pm, ten minutes before practice would begin, and Jack and his friends were hanging around on the field. More than half of the team was already there, though oddly enough, I saw no sign of Max.

“Jack!” I called out as I headed over to his group, which had served as my surrogate group for the past month. Other than Jack, I could hardly call any of them my friends. Sure, we talked at lunch, since we shared the same table, but I never hung out with any of them outside of school.

The wiry boy turned away from his friends for a moment to acknowledge me. Expecting his usual trademark grin, I was instead met with a frown and an uneasy stare. He quickly turned back to his friends and mumbled something inaudible to them.

I stopped dead in my tracks, my heart now pounding in my chest. Did he somehow know about last night? Or was he just mad I ditched him in the middle of the party? I kind of hoped it was the latter.

Jack left his friend group and headed over to me. Now that he was in front of me, I could see the weariness in his eyes. I assumed he was hung over. “Robert, we need to talk.”

I sensed no malice in his tone. It seemed desperate, sad even. I wasn’t sure now what he was going to say, but I knew it couldn’t be good.

We walked over to one of the goalposts on the football field. I leaned my back up against the pole and folded my arms waiting for him to speak.

“Please tell me it’s not true, what they’re saying about you.”

“What are you talking about?” I feigned ignorance.

Jack pressed his lips together in a pout. “Really? You’re gonna do this again? I know you’ve been hiding something from me, Robert, so cut the crap and tell me whether it’s true or not.”

“Why does it matter?” I asked flippantly.

“Because I’m not allowed to associate with… those kind of people,” he replied.

“Says who?”

“Says my parents.”

I scoffed. “Since when did you start listening to your parents? Huh? Did they let you go on a bender last night? Get so blackout drunk that you had to be carried home?”

“Since they threatened to transfer me to some private school in Indianapolis if I continue to be friends with a queer!” Jack raised his voice.

I was completely taken aback. That was the first time I had ever heard Jack take that tone, let alone with me. How did his parents even know, unless… Sharon. Damn her! If I already didn’t dislike Jack’s sister enough, now I really hated her for driving a wedge in my friendship with him. I never believed she would actually go as far as to snitch on her younger brother. “That’s crazy!” I exclaimed.

“They’ve been hunting for any excuse. They’ve already been talking to the principal of one school who told them he was extremely excited to recruit a star runner. I can’t defy them again, Robert, or they’ll pull me out of Hawkins High, and I really don’t want to leave. So please. Tell me it isn’t true.”

I wished I could tell him what he wanted to hear: that I wasn’t a queer, that it all just rumors. That Will was only my best friend helping me when I threw up in the bathroom and someone found us and got the wrong idea. But I couldn’t. I was a queer, Will was my boyfriend, and we had gotten back together in the bathroom last night. And even if I prolonged the lies, dismissed the rumors, he’d eventually find out the truth, or worse, his parents would and he’d be shipped off to private school in Indianapolis with me to blame. As my eyes began to well up, I bit my lip. “I… I can’t.”

Jack winced, his nose crinkling. “Then I’m afraid we can’t be friends anymore. And you’re gonna have to find another lunch table.” I could tell he hadn’t wanted to say what he said, but it still stung all the same.

“Why? Your parents don’t have to know if we’re still friends! It’s not like they’re watching you in school!” I tried to plead with him, though I knew it was futile.

Jack shook his head. “No, but Sharon will be. I can’t risk it.” He let out an exasperated sigh. “I’m sorry.” His face said it all. He was heartbroken, forced to end a friendship against his will while caught in his parents’ iron grip.

“Yeah, well, I’m sorry too,” I snapped at him angrily.

“Please, don’t take it so personally, Robert. I wish you and Will the best, really.”

I glared at him. I didn’t want his pity or sympathy. “Go to hell, Jack.”

“You know…” Jack folded his arms. “… it really sucks that I had to find out from my parents of all people. You could have trusted me, Robert. I wouldn’t have told anyone. But here we are,” he said, sounding more resigned than angry. Jack gave me one last hard look before turning around and walking away back toward his friends.

Everything in me wanted to scream at him — make him feel my pain, know just how shitty he was being — but it wasn’t worth it, certainly not in front of everyone. The fact that rumors were spreading was bad enough, I didn’t need to throw gas in the flames.

My hands balled into fists, my fingernails digging into my palms as I held back tears and tried to take deep breaths. I stayed put, still leaning up against the goal post. I was unwelcome in Jack’s group, and Max hadn’t arrived yet. What would she make of Jack shunning me? Certainly she would be mad at him. Would she still want to hang out with him? If she did, how would she choose who to hang out with during practice and at meets? Whose lunch table would she sit at? It was hard enough for her when Lucas had his own table and when she sacrificed sitting with the party to sit with me. The last thing I wanted was to be responsible yet again for pulling Max away from her other friends. That wasn’t fair to her.

Coach Collins got up from one of the benches on the field and called everyone over to start practice. Max was still nowhere to be seen. I started to get worried. It was totally unlike her to be late. Was she sick or did she somehow blank and forget we had practice today? Whatever the case, I really needed her now. I had no one else to talk to on the team. And while before I might have been brave enough to attempt to engage with my other teammates, there was no way I could do that now. So I decided to keep to myself for the duration of practice.

As our coach gave us our itinerary for today, I found myself tuning out, thoughts still flooding over Jack ending our friendship. It started to really sink in now. No more working together on math homework, no more trips to Benny’s Burgers. He’d never even flash that stupid grin of his for me again. I thought about how he had opened up to me twice, first about his parents, and then about liking Max. He trusted me for whatever reason, but despite that I could never allow myself to trust him enough to share my secrets. Though he never said I had been a shitty friend outright, I could read between the lines.

I’d never felt more alone at cross country practice. I’d always had someone to talk to, whether it be Max, Jack, or Jack’s trio of friends. I hadn’t even been all that keen on joining the team to begin with until Max told me she was joining earlier in the summer and suggested I do as well, reminding me how much I had enjoyed running in gym class in eighth grade. She had also attempted to appeal to my competitive nature by promising we could race each other over the summer to start training, though that never really panned out. Our morning runs ended up being much more leisurely.

It became clear Max wasn’t going to show up when we started our route. Jack was at the front of the pack, as per usual. I remembered how jealous I had been of him always being ahead of everyone else, but now all I could think about was how the distance between us kept growing larger and larger as I lagged behind.

One of my teammates running near me gave me a dirty look as he passed by me. It was Calvin, a sophomore boy with sandy mop of blonde hair and an obnoxious personality. He was the kind of guy who seemed nice when you first met him but you’d later find out he talked trash behind your back. He always had something to say about everyone. Max and I never talked to him, though Jack naively thought Calvin liked him. Neither of us had the stomach to tell him otherwise. He turned to another teammate named Brad he was running alongside. “I heard he was getting head from Zombie Boy in the bathroom at Jennifer Hayes’s party last night,” Calvin said, just loud enough for me to overhear.

“Eww, that’s grody,” Brad replied. Brad had a strong jawline and dark brown hair but was shorter than Calvin by three inches or so. He was Calvin’s best friend on the team, but they always antagonized each other.

“Yeah, careful in the locker room Brad, or you might give the fairy a peep show.”

“I say let him watch. I’ve got nothing to hide!” Brad said haughtily.

“Just your small dick!” the first boy teased.

“It’s bigger than yours!”

“In your dreams!”

I grew nauseated listening to their disgusting gossip about me. Running suddenly began to feel like torture. All I wanted to do was go home and cry.

_I should just leave_, I considered as I allowed myself to fall all the way to the back of our group. _Coach Collins is in the middle of the pack. I could just turn around and run back to campus right now. No one would even notice I’m gone, let alone miss me._

The idea was tempting. So tempting in fact, that I ended up caving on a whim._ Screw it, I’m doing it. I’m going home_, I decided. I allowed everyone to get a bit further ahead of me before starting to bolt in the opposite direction. It wasn’t totally spontaneous. I had felt like going home from the moment Jack walked away from me minutes before practice started. I thought about pretending to be sick, though it wouldn’t really be much of a stretch, since I kind of felt a bit sick to my stomach anyway. My nerves always did that to me.

I wondered whether anyone would even notice my absence. It’s not like our coach ever did a head count after we got back to campus, which might seem kind of dumb, but no one’s ever ditched in the middle of a run before, at least not while I’ve been on the team. Maybe Jack would notice once everyone got back. He’d look around wondering how I held up without him or Max and realize I’m gone. Would he get concerned enough to bring up my absence with our coach? Or would he just assume I went home sick and had already discussed it with our coach mid run. It wasn’t the most unreasonable thing for him to assume, being already somewhat familiar with my nerve induced nausea.

I slowed down once everyone was out of sight. I still needed enough energy to bike home after all.

Soon enough I made it back to campus and over to the bike racks. I unlocked my bike, hopped on and started pedaling my way home. My stomach swelled as I got an adrenaline rush from my impulsive act of rebellion. The only other time I had ditched practice was that first day of school after I broke up with Will when I hadn’t eaten anything the whole day and would have probably passed out mid-run had I attempted to go to practice. I felt myself smiling a bit as I rode down the suburban streets of central Hawkins, the sun beating down on my crown. The sun had finally come out after a cloudy first half of the day, though it was still chilly, a good fifty degrees Fahrenheit or so. If it weren’t for the weather, it’d be all too easy to mistake this for a summer day. But that feeling of freedom was a fleeting one, as I quickly reminded myself why I ditched practice to begin with. Somehow being alone amongst a group of people was much worse than being truly alone, probably because when you’re around others you’re constantly reminded of the isolation between you and them.

As I turned onto Maple Street from Jackson, I decided I really didn’t want to feel either type right now. The thought of being alone at home for an hour and half before my mom got home from work didn’t sound the least bit appealing. So in another impulsive move, I raced my bike right past my house and reached the intersection of Maple and Kiney, a new destination in mind.

Both Jonathan and Joyce’s cars were still gone when I arrived at the Byers’ home off of Mirkwood for the second time today. Still clad in my running clothes, I hopped off my bike, leaned up against the front porch and knocked on the door, hoping that Will was home and not off somewhere else. His bike was still out front, so that gave me hope.

After a few moments of waiting impatiently, Will answered the door. The surprised look on his face gave away that he hadn’t been expecting company.

“Hey, aren’t you supposed to be at practice?” he asked before noticing the hurt on my face. “Robert, what’s wrong?”

All those tears I had held back from the moment Jack abruptly ended our friendship right before practice up until now began to stream down my face. I started to sob as Will hugged me tight in the doorway, rubbing my back gently with his hand.


	2. The Elephant in the Room

“So that’s it? Just like that, you guys aren’t friends anymore?” Will could hardly believe his ears as the two of us were sitting together on the old brown and taupe striped sofa in the Byers’ living room. I had just finished explaining to him what happened at practice with Jack.

I nodded sullenly.

“That’s crazy! I didn’t even think he was physically capable of being anything other than like super nice. The guy’s like a human golden retriever.”

Will’s hyperbole of Jack reminded me how little he actually knew the lanky runner. He, like most people, only saw the way Jack presented himself: cheerful, bubbly, energetic. But Max and I both knew underneath that outgoing carefree exterior was a boy crying for help, gasping for air. He rarely ever displayed that kind of vulnerability, certainly never at our lunch table. But he did last night at the Halloween party when he started guzzling beer and spiked punch like water after a long run. The first couple of drinks he had for fun. But once his senses started to dull, he became addicted to that feeling, to the loss of inhibition. The immense amount of pressure his parents put on their son at such a young age and their constant disappointment with him and frequent comparisons to his overachiever sister pushed him to find another method of escape because as time went on, not even the euphoria of running helped him as much he wished it would.

So when Jack told me we couldn’t be friends anymore because his parents wouldn’t allow it, I knew there was no convincing him otherwise. Despite his best efforts to have us believe otherwise, deep down all Jack wanted to do was please his parents. Being the fastest runner on the cross country team wasn’t good enough for them when they wanted him to do football in the fall and basketball in the winter (like his sister). Getting all A’s in only regular classes instead of honors classes wasn’t good enough for them either. Jack needed a win somewhere. It was only a shame it required losing something important to him in return.

Still, I couldn’t help but feel angry and betrayed. Sure Jack didn’t want to do what he did, but he did it nonetheless. I wanted for Jack to not care what his parents thought of him, just like I wanted to not care what the world thought about Will and me together. I wanted our friendship to mean more to him than his parents’ approval. Maybe that was selfish of me, or maybe he was the one being selfish. I wasn’t sure. It’s all relative, I guess.

“You know the worst part of it all is he would’ve been totally cool with me being the way I am had I told him the truth earlier. If only I could’ve trusted him more, maybe he wouldn’t have abandoned me. Maybe he would've actually tried to work things out,” I said regretfully.

“And maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference. In fact, maybe it’d hurt even more — losing someone you trusted with intimate secrets.”

I let out an audible sigh. “You’re probably right. It’s not like he ever had a choice to begin with. I mean, did I really expect him to risk having his parents pull him out of Hawkins High just to try to be friends with me in secret?”

“There’s _always_ a choice. Sooner or later, he’ll figure out he made the wrong one,” Will said confidently.

I looked at him in disbelief. “How can you be so sure?”

Will narrowed his eyes at me. “You dare question the wisdom of Will the Wise?” he boomed in the overly dramatic singsongy voice he'd use when he got to be the Dungeon Master in our D&D games.

I recoiled a bit, not expecting him to pull that act on me right now. “No… well, maybe, I don’t know.”

“Have faith, Robert the Rogue. For there’s more to your story with Jack the… Jack the…” Will dropped the D&D theatrics. “I don’t know. What do you think his title should be?”

I shut my eyes. “I don’t care, Will,” I groaned.

“All right, fine. Just trust me, Robert. He’ll come back.”

I nodded slightly before staring down at the floor, still not convinced he was right about Jack ever eventually deciding to be friends again. At this point it seemed more likely that Lucas would rejoin the party, considering his move to warning Mike and El about Todd planning to humiliate us last night, and even that seemed nigh impossible. In both cases, it was probably best to just move on and stop thinking about them, because giving my hopes up for either of them was surely a road to disappointment.

“What about Max? What does she think about all of this? She must have raised so much hell.”

“She wasn’t at practice,” I mumbled.

Will looked confused. “Wait, what? Why not?”

“I was wondering the same thing,” I acknowledged.

“Is that why you ditched? Because you had no one else to talk to?”

Sitting with my shoulders hunched forward and my hands splayed out beside me, I stared straight ahead at the dark blank screen of the Byers’ television set. It was an older model, more than five years old. One of the antennae had broken off about a year and a half ago, but had been hastily fixed and patched up with black tape by Bob, who had always been handy with all things electronic. I wondered if besides the prohibitively expensive cost for the Byers, the reason Joyce had been hesitant to upgrade to a more up-to-date set like my mom and Mrs. Wheeler had already done was because it would be kind of like letting go of a piece of Bob.

“I didn’t wanna be alone,” I muttered softly, cringing immediately after the words escaped my mouth. It was embarrassing, saying it out loud — admitting that I couldn’t even survive one practice without my friends around. I felt pathetic.

Will put his hand on top of mine. “You’re not alone. I’m here for you. Always.”

I turned my gaze to him, my lips curling into a slight smile. “I know.”

His hand quickly retreated back toward his side, using it to help hoist himself up off the couch. “Come.”

I looked up at him. “Where are we going?”

“To find out where Max is. The phone’s over there.” He gestured toward the hallway.

I stood up and followed him around the corner where their dark gray telephone hung on the hallway wall. Unlike their television set, Joyce had replaced the phone twice since Will first disappeared.

Will standing next to me, I pulled the phone off the hook and pushed the numbered buttons to dial Max’s house.

The phone rang three times. I dug my sock covered toes into the carpeted floor a as I waited for someone to pick up.

“Hello, this is the Hargroves,” I heard the voice of a woman I recognized as Max’s mother answer on the other end.

“Hi, Mrs. Hargrove, this is Robert. I’m a friend of Max’s. Is she home?”

“Just a moment.”

Susan Hargrove stepped out of the kitchen where they kept their downstairs phone after placing the phone down on the counter, and walked up the stairs to Max’s bedroom. She was unaware that Max had skipped practice today, believing that it had been cancelled like her daughter told her.

From outside Max’s bedroom door, Susan could hear loud music blaring from Max’s boom box. The timid red haired woman knocked on the door to her daughter’s room and opened it slightly, poking her head in.

Max was laying on her bed, reading a Wonder Woman comic. The song playing was “Private Idaho” by The B-52s.

“Max, your friend Robert’s on the phone,” Susan informed her.

Upon hearing my name, Max shook her head frantically and mouthed “no.”

“What do you want me to tell him?”

“I don’t know. Make up something.”

Susan nodded and closed the door, returning downstairs to pick up the phone. I must have waited about a minute or so. “I’m sorry. Max is feeling a little under the weather right now. Maybe you can try again tomorrow.”

Before I could respond, she hung up the phone. I slowly pulled the phone away from my ear, Will giving me a confused look. “Her mom said she’s not feeling well.”

“Do you really believe that?”

I shook my head. “No. If she really wasn’t feeling well, wouldn’t her mom have said so right off the bat?”

Will shrugged.

“Let’s try radioing her. Is your Supercom in your room?”

“Yeah.”

“Come on,” I started off toward his bedroom. Will followed me there, though with not quite as much urgency.

We sat cross-legged on his bed as I tightly gripped his Supercom and tried to communicate with Max. “Max, do you copy? I repeat: Max, do you copy?”

No response.

“Maybe she doesn’t have her Supercom near her,” Will guessed.

“I have to keep trying.” Pressing down hard on the talk button with my thumb, I was determined not to stop until she picked up. “Max. Do you copy? C’mon, Max. I need to tell you something. Max! Max! Max! MAX! ”

Irritated by my incessant attempts to communicate with her, she scoffed to herself, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” She fumbled for her Supercom laying on the floor and picked it up. “Stop… calling,” Max replied curtly. She pushed the antenna down, and dropped the Supercom back on the floor. She proceeded to pick up where she left off in her comic.

“She turned it off,” I said, disappointed.

“I think she might be mad at you,” Will observed.

“No, really? I didn’t notice,” I replied sarcastically. “She’s clearly avoiding me, Will. That’s why she ditched practice.”

“She’s probably waiting for an apology. You did kind of overreact last night.”

“You don’t think I know that already?! You don’t think I’ve been anxiously waiting all day to see her at practice so that I could finally properly apologize to her for how shitty I’ve been?!” I snapped at him.

Will looked taken aback by my harsh tone.

Seeing him recoil immediately made me feel guilty. My frustration had nothing do with him, yet there I was taking it out on him anyway. My face softened. “I’m sorry, that wasn’t called for. It’s just… how am I supposed to apologize if she won’t even talk to me?”

“Maybe she just needs a little space,” he suggested. “She has been hanging out with you all month long. Give it the weekend. I’m sure by Tuesday we’ll all be sitting together in bio again working on labs like old times.”

“I’m just glad you’re not gonna sit alone in the back anymore.”

“God, it was so hard to see the board back there,” Will admitted. There was a beat of silence between us. “Hey, so I know this afternoon’s been kind of rough for you, and I don’t want you to go home all sad and stuff, so I was wondering if you maybe wanted to stay over tonight? I’m sure my mom won’t mind. Hell, she’ll probably be ecstatic to have you here again.”

“What am I gonna tell _my_ mom? She doesn’t know we’re back together, remember?”

“How about the truth?”

I scratched my head. “I don’t know… it was bad enough when she found out the first time.”

“What if… you didn’t have to tell her alone? I could come with you. Besides, you probably need to grab a few things from your place anyway.”

I looked at him, dumbfounded. “You’d really do that? Face my mom with me?”

“Of course I would. Stronger together, right?”

I sprang onto him, hugging him tight. “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” I kissed his cheek.

Will blushed as he reciprocated my hug.  
______________________________________________________________________________

The two of us biked over to my house. It was a little after 5pm when we arrived and my mom wasn’t home from work yet. She usually didn’t get home until around 6, so we had the place to ourselves for a little while. I decided to take a shower since I was a bit sweaty from practice. I grabbed the clothes I had been wearing earlier and some clean underwear out of my dresser drawer and brought them into the bathroom. While I took my much needed shower, Will hung out in my bedroom. I told Will to help himself to whatever music he could find while he waited.

Will perused my tape collection I displayed on my bookshelf and found the album _Unknown Pleasures_ by Joy Division. He recognized the cover from Jonathan’s record collection — solid black with a rectangular grayscale sketch in the center depicting jagged mountains separating a grassy plain. No artist name or album title. He opened the case, took out the tape and put it in my boombox, which was sitting on top of my dresser. He pressed the rewind button to make sure it was at the beginning of the tape. Once it was, he pressed play. The first track “Disorder” began to fill the room.

He looked around my room, noticing the walls looked remarkably more bare than they used to, and frowned upon realizing why that was. Will knew my room well enough to know when things were missing, especially things as obvious as pictures on the walls. Still, despite how unhappy it made him, he could hardly blame me since he had also torn down the pictures of us on the walls of Castle Byers. Fearing the worst, Will decided to search my room for the missing pictures. He scoured through a few of my dresser drawers but found nothing.

Determined to find them, he got down on his hands and knees and peeked under my bed. He pulled away some loose articles of clothing, old sweatshirts I didn’t wear much anymore off. Underneath them was a rolled up paper about 11”x17” in size held by a rubber band on each end. The roll was slightly flattened by the weight of clothes sitting on top of it for weeks on end. Will pulled away the rubber bands and unrolled the paper. Eying his own handiwork, he let out a sigh, relieved I hadn’t torn up his drawing of me and thrown it away like he worried I might have. Setting it down next to him on the floor, he continued to search underneath my bed for more pictures.

Will pulled away some older T-shirts of mine that were too small on me now and found a stack of photographs face down. He flipped them over. On top was the picture of him I took that August day we had our picnic out in my backyard. He set the rest of the stack down and examined the picture more closely. A tear formed around his right eye as he recalled how happy he had been that day and how he had hardly allowed himself to be that happy since.

Having finished my shower and gotten dressed into my clothes from earlier in the day, I padded across the carpeted floor of the upstairs hallway back to my room. I could hear from down the hall that he was a few tracks into my Joy Division tape. My door was left slightly ajar. I stepped inside expecting him to immediately greet me, but much to my surprise I instead found Will sitting on the floor of my room with his back to me and some old articles of clothing from under my bed lying beside him. Suspicious of what he was doing with stuff from under my bed, I silently peered over his shoulder from across the room and discovered he was staring at none other than my favorite photo of him: the one I took at our picnic in my backyard that had ever since the night of argument been orphaned from its broken frame. He was so engrossed in the picture and the music was loud enough that he hadn’t noticed me come in.

“You know, I still think that was the best day ever,” I remarked.

Startled, Will jolted a bit as he heard my voice from across the room. He spun his head around to face me and quickly set the photo down on top of the stack, shoving them and the drawing back under the bed. “I-I’m s-sorry, I shouldn’t have gone through your stuff. I just saw your walls, and I got worried that… that…”

“That I threw all our pictures away? Will, I would never get rid of any of them.”

“Even after everything I said that night?”

“Never.”

Will’s lips curled into a smile as another wave of relief washed over him.

As I went over to join him on the floor, he pushed aside some of my old clothes to make room for me. I sat down next to him and reached under my bed where he had shoved the stack of photographs and his drawing. I picked up the photo he had been staring at, getting a closer look. I couldn’t help but smile. Will had the most infectious grin. Seeing the pure joy on his face reminded me of just how much fun that day had truly been. Not even Todd and his goons at the pool had been able to ruin it.

“By the way, I thought we agreed no more best days ever,” Will reminded me in a tongue-in-cheek manner.

I set the photo back down and gave him a peck on the lips. “Just that one.”

“Robert, do you copy? I repeat. Robert, do you copy?” Mike’s voice randomly sounded through my Supercom, interrupting our tender moment on the floor of my bedroom.

I quickly reached up and grabbed it off my nightstand, leaning over Will and almost falling into his lap. In retrospect I probably should have just asked Will grab it and hand it to me. “Yeah, I copy, Mike. What’s up? Over,” I answered, pointing at the boombox. Will understood what I wanted and scrambled over to it, turning down the volume knob. I got up off the floor and sat down on my bed.

“Is Will with you? He wasn’t answering his Supercom. Over.”

Hearing his name mentioned Will quickly headed back over from the boombox and plopped down next to me on the bed. I held the walkie talkie closer up to him. “Yeah, I’m with him. Over,” Will confirmed, looking intrigued as to what Mike might be messaging us about.

“Cool. So, I was thinking, since El’s grounded, that maybe you guys could come over to my house tonight. I’m gonna invite Dustin too. It’ll be like a guys night, just the four of us. We could watch a movie or two, and you could all sleep over. It _has_ been awhile after all, since… the last time. Over.” There was a distinct wistfulness in Mike’s voice that suggested the lanky raven-haired boy had been feeling nostalgic about the sleepovers the five of us used to all have together before El and Max joined the party. However, the last time Mike was referring to was that late July night when Lucas and Dustin both made a stink about Will and me sleeping in the same room as them and Mike subsequently gave them crap for making a big deal out of nothing, eventually getting frustrated enough to leave them by themselves in the basement while he went upstairs to sleep with us in his room. Not exactly the best sleepover we’d had as a party.

I looked to Will to see what he thought. He nodded.

“You still there? Over,” Mike checked.

“Yeah… that sounds great, Mike,” I replied. “There’s just… something I have to take care of first. Over.”

“Awesome. Just let me know when you two’re about to come over. No rush. Over.”

“Will do. Over and out.” I set my Supercom back on my nightstand. _Awesome_, I thought to myself, echoing Mike’s use of the word. I now had the perfect excuse to put off this whole telling my mom we’re back together thing. Truth be told, I was still quite scared to tell her, despite Will being here with me. Since that night she flipped out on me after finding out we had been dating, the topic hadn’t once come up between us. As far as I was concerned, my mom thought I was confused rather than gay and was relieved that I had ended my relationship with him.

This past month, my mom and I had been living two parallel lives under the same roof, neither of them intertwining with any shared emotional connection. While she clearly had put in more effort to be around in the evenings and not go to as many of her typical dinner meetings, there was a distinct distance between us that ironically enough only grew more intense at the kitchen table. At breakfast and dinner, which were the only times I found myself interacting with my mom lately, she’d always have plenty of things to talk about, mostly related to her job. She’d tell me all about her ideas for new land developments in Hawkins, her goal to help revitalize downtown Hawkins, which had become somewhat of a ghost town since the Starcourt Mall opened up and forced a lot of businesses to close, and the roadblocks she kept running into with the local government. I’d smile and nod, give the occasional “Uh huh.” And when she wasn’t talking about her job, she’d ask me questions like how my day was, how much homework my teachers were piling on me, and whether I had any tests coming up. She’d occasionally ask about my friends as well, though notably never Will. It became rote how I’d answer her every time, giving her canned one to three word answers like “It was okay,” or “Good I guess,” when it came to my day. Even on my worst days, I would never allow myself to say anything that would cause alarm and lead to an extended discussion. After the way she reacted to the news of Will and me dating, I hadn’t felt comfortable sharing anything personal or emotional with her. The one exception had been about Jack. Not the day I had gotten mad at him for not taking my efforts to outrun him during practice seriously, but the day he, Max and I had gone to Benny’s Burgers. I had come home on an emotional high and gushed about how cool he was and how good of a time we all had, though I of course had left out the feelings I had started to develop for him. I remember my mom beaming, glad to see I was making new friends and enjoying cross country.

And yet despite these daily conversations we’d have at our kitchen table, there was a deafening silence between us, an elephant in the room that was never addressed. I could tell she knew how much I had been hurting the past month. The way she’d look at me sometimes from across the table with her sad chocolate brown eyes easily gave that away. I never once expected an apology for her dismissal of my feelings toward Will and her lack of sympathy for the emotional distress caused by our breakup. I had come to accept that my mom was against the idea of me being queer and likely denying it to herself every day. I wondered when the lecture would come on why being a queer would do me no good, but it never came. She carefully avoided discussing anything surrounding the source of my emotional distress.

And I didn’t even have the option to avoid these painfully awkward kitchen table conversations with my mom and go to a friends’ house for dinner. I went to Jack’s once, but after his parents grilled me with probing questions (giving Jack secondhand embarrassment) and then Jack confessed he was crushing on Max, I never felt comfortable going back. And Max’s stepdad never allowed her to have boys over, not that Max ever felt comfortable bringing them over anyway with the way her stepdad was. And because of Mr. Hargrove’s unspoken prejudice toward black people, Lucas had largely steered clear of her house, only appearing outside occasionally to take her somewhere, though she had snuck him inside a few times while her parents and Billy weren’t home. El was the only one of us who ever regularly went over to her house. The only person I might have been able to ask was Dustin, but once he had started to distance himself from both sides of the schism in the past month in an attempt to avoid the drama surrounding the fallout of my breakup with Will, it became awkward to ask him to do me any favors. I imagined any dinner with El and Hopper would involve El trying to guilt trip me into reconnecting with Will while Hopper gave me some cliche lecture on the importance of holding onto the ones you love, and dinner with Mike and his family would have similarly featured Mike trying to guilt trip me, but in a much more subtle way so his parents wouldn’t pick up on any romantic elements, while Nancy shot me sad disapproving looks from across the table between the occasional piece of “sisterly” advice. Neither scenario sounded enticing in the least bit.

So while the task of telling my mom we were back together had become a bit less daunting with Will by my side, her silence on the issue all month and my lack of any sense of whether her thoughts on it all had changed or stayed the same since the night she first found out left me feeling still quite uneasy.

I turned to look at my boyfriend. “Will, I changed my mind. I think we should just go to Mike’s right now. My mom’s not home yet. Maybe we can do this another time.”

Will shook his head vehemently, his chestnut bangs ruffling against his forehead. “No way! I’m not letting you back out now. You can’t keep putting it off.” Will was more than familiar with my tendency to procrastinate and would often go out of his way to discourage it, especially when it came to studying and school projects.

“I don’t know if I can do it, Will. Not after the way she reacted last time.”

Will put his arm around my shoulder. “You can, Robert. Trust me. It’s gonna be okay. Besides, the hard part’s already over, right?”

I stared down at the floor, still not entirely convinced.

“Just remember I’m gonna be there by your side the whole way through.”

I sighed. I could continue to protest, but it was hardly worth the effort. There was no getting out of it as long as Will was here with me. “All right. Fine. But as soon as it’s done we’re going straight to Mike’s.”

“Deal.”  
______________________________________________________________________________

After a few more dreadfully long minutes of waiting, we heard my mom’s car pull up onto our driveway. I told Will to wait upstairs until I was ready to make the announcement to her so she wouldn’t be immediately startled by Will’s presence. I hurried downstairs into the living room and turned on the TV to make it appear as though it were just me at home relaxing after practice. I kicked my feet up onto the coffee table and leaned back on the sofa as I flicked through channels to find something.

Before I could settle on a channel, my mom walked in through the door.

“Hey, sleepyhead. Didn’t catch you at breakfast this morning.”

“Didn’t catch you last night either,” I said flatly.

“What time did you get back from trick-or-treating?”

I jutted my lip a bit. She had no idea what I was really up to last night. I decided to keep it that way, at least for the time being. “Umm… pretty late, I guess. We ended up running into Mike and the others and joining them.” Technically nothing I said was a lie, though by withholding the fact that I had instead gone to a huge booze soaked house party, I might as well have been. Maybe I’d tell her in the future, but for now, it was probably better to not give her two things to possibly get angry over at once.

“Oh, that’s nice. Sorry I missed you come in. It must have been close to midnight before I woke up on the sofa with the candy bowl still sitting on my lap,” she chuckled.

I chuckled a bit too in response, remembering how funny that sight was when I stepped inside last night. “Yeah, you did look pretty peaceful. I figured it was better not to disturb you.”

“Or maybe you didn’t want me to know how late you got back,” she replied, half-joking.

“It was a little after ten,” I admitted sheepishly.

“You’re lucky you didn’t have school today.”

_You have no idea_, I thought smugly to myself. “I know.”

“Well, anyway, what do you want for dinner? We’ve got some frozen meals in the freezer. Or I could cook us some spaghetti?

I knew now was the time to speak up about Will, before she got involved in food preparation. I bit my lip. “Mom, wait. I need to tell you something. Actually… _we_ need to tell you something.”

My mom gave me funny look. “We?”

Will finally made his presence known by coming down the stairs from the upstairs hallway, where he had been stealthily watching and listening. He waved awkwardly at her as he descended.

My mom jumped in shock upon seeing him. “Will! What are you doing here? Robert, what’s going on?”

I got up from the sofa and met Will at the bottom of the steps. We stood side by side as we faced my mom across the hallway. I swallowed as I felt the butterflies in my stomach I always got from doing anything nerve-wracking. “The two of us… we’re back together. We made up last night.” I took a breath. “I love him, Mom.”

Will took my hand. “And I love him.”

“So whether you like it or not, you’re going to have to accept it.”

My mom stared at us for a moment, her mouth slightly agape. I felt myself growing tenser and more afraid as I awaited her response.

Then the unexpected happened. She started to sob. “Oh, Robert. Come here,” my mom said, wiping tears from her face.

Confused, I looked over at Will. He gave me a gentle reassuring nod. I let go of Will’s hand and stepped gingerly toward my mom.

Once I was close enough, she braced my shoulders and looked straight up into my dark brown eyes. I was much taller than my mom, by a good five to six inches or so.

“Of course I’ll accept it. All I’ve ever wanted is for you to be happy.”

“But… what about what you said before?”

“It was wrong. All of it. _I_ was the one who was confused, not you. In fact, I’d never seen you so sure of anything in your life. It was just… hearing from Joyce that you two had been secretly dating since early July really threw me for a loop, and I… overreacted. I was scared for you, Robert. The world out there can be so cruel. But instead of trying to understand what you were going through and help you through it, all I ended up doing was making you feel like it was wrong to be who you are. But it’s not, Robert. It’s not wrong at all.” She sniffled a bit. “You must think I’m a horrible mother. And who could blame you?” A great deal of shame hung over her words.

The emotional vulnerability my mom was displaying now was nothing like I’d ever seen from her before, and frankly it made me quite uncomfortable. I couldn’t even imagine how uncomfortable Will must have been feeling witnessing her breakdown. I felt a strong obligation to assuage the doubts my mom had about her parenting. She was far from a horrible mother. She had made countless sacrifices in her life to help take care of me and provide me with stability. Was it really fair to condemn her for having a knee-jerk reaction to finding out her son was gay and dating his best friend from his best friend’s mother? I started to tear up. “No… of course not."

“I’m so sorry, Robert. For that and for all the times I wasn’t there for you when you needed me most. I hope you can find it somewhere in that big heart of yours to forgive me.”

Overcome with a mixture of relief and joy, I hugged her tight.

She smiled a bit. “I can’t tell you enough how proud of you I am, Robert. For doing the right thing by making up with Will and standing up for yourself now. My little man’s growing up.” She pinched my cheek.

“Mom…” I blushed, looking behind me at Will, who quickly averted his gaze. “You’re embarrassing me.”

“Oh shut it,” she squeezed me back into a hug.

“Umm… I can give you two some space if you’d like,” Will started to back away, feeling the secondhand embarrassment of my mom’s affection toward me.

“And just where do you think you’re going, young man? Get in here.”

Bewildered by the firm but warm tone of my mom’s demand, Will stepped toward us awkwardly.

Once he was close enough, my mom squeezed him into our hug. “Will, you’ve become such a fine young man. Your mom must be doing something right.”

Will blushed and chuckled nervously. “Thanks.” He gathered his thoughts mid-hug. “So, umm, does that mean you’re okay with us being together, like… as a couple?” he asked, trying to make sure my mom really understood what was going on between us.

She let go of us, finally. “If it makes you both happy, then yes, I’m okay with it, but just remember it’s not going to be easy for you boys. Most people, especially in this town don’t look too kindly on…”

“We know, Mom. We know,” I said, cutting her off.

“Well, then, now that that’s settled, are you boys sticking around for dinner, or do you have plans?”

“Mike invited us over for a sleepover, so we’re gonna head over to his place now,” I informed her.

“Oh, sounds like fun! Say hi to Karen for me, will you?”

“Sure thing,” I nodded. “We’re just gonna grab some stuff upstairs first and be on our way.”

“Okay. Try not to come back too late tomorrow. Remember you’ve still got homework to do for Monday.”

“I know, Mom.”

Will and I went back upstairs to my room. I closed the door after us, a smile creeping across my face. “Yes!” I pumped my fist in victory. “I can’t believe we just pulled that off! I thought she was gonna totally flip!”

He beamed. “Dude, you were amazing back there!” He held up his hand for a high five.

I high-fived him.

“I told you you were brave!”

I shrugged. “I don’t think I could have done it without you,” I said as I grabbed my backpack off the floor.

“Nah, I bet you would have totally still nailed it on your own. I barely said anything,” he replied as I dumped the contents of my backpack onto my bed.

“Either way, it was way more effective having you there. Made more of a statement, you know?” I began to scrounge my drawers for a change of clothes for tomorrow.

“It’s gotta feel good, right? Getting it off your chest?”

I stuffed my extra clothes into my backpack. “Yeah, it’s like… I finally don’t have to hold my breath around her anymore.” I looked up from my backpack at him. “Hey, Will.”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks… for helping me through it.”

He smiled. “Of course.”

“There should be an extra toothbrush in the drawer in the bathroom if you wanna bring it along,” I offered. I knew he hadn’t come prepared to sleep at someone else’s house since the original plan had been to go back to his place. Fortunately Mike had extra sleeping bags and pillows at his house, so we didn’t need to bring ours. “Do you wanna borrow any pajamas or clothes for tomorrow?”

“Umm, I guess some pajama pants and a T-shirt to sleep in would be nice.”

“Okay. I’ll find something for you. While you’re in there, can you grab my toothbrush and toothpaste too?”

“Sure.” Will left my room and headed down the hall to the bathroom to grab the toiletries. I pulled out a pair of older pajama pants that were slightly small on me in the waist but I knew would fit Will perfectly. I also grabbed a heather gray Hawkins High Cross Country team t-shirt with dark green lettering for him to wear, snickering to myself as I imagined his reaction to having to wear a shirt for a sports team that was all about doing one of the things he hated most: running. I stuffed them into my backpack along with pajama pants and a shirt for myself.

Will came back with the toothbrushes and toothpaste. He held them out in front of him for me to see. “This right?”

I smirked as I tried to suppress my giggles. “Yeah, that’s perfect.” I took them from him and tossed them into my backpack, zipping it up.

His brow furrowed. “What? W-what’s so funny?”

“Nothing. Nothing.”

He gave me a hard look, raising his right eyebrow. “God, you’re so weird sometimes.”

“Weird’s good, right? Isn’t that what your brother always says?”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever, ‘little man,’” Will smirked in turn.

I rolled my eyes, unamused by his use of my mom’s cutesy talk. “Wow, really Will?”

He laughed, having now discovered a new way to push my buttons.

“I’m taller than you!” I vociferated.

“By two inches! I’d say the height difference between us now is pretty _small_ potatoes,” he teased, trying to be punny but falling hopelessly flat. Will was now five feet six inches tall, leaving Dustin as the shortest boy in the party. I had first taken notice of Will’s growth spurt last night upon being stuck with him in Jennifer Hayes’s bathroom

“Ugh,” I groaned. “Let’s just get out of here already.” I grabbed my navy flannel shirt jacket off the back of my desk chair and put it on.

Will nodded in agreement, picking his olive green jacket up off my bed and putting it on. “Right behind you.”

As we left my room, I slung my backpack around my shoulder and put both arms through the straps. It wasn’t particularly heavy like when I carried around textbooks on top of my usual binder and notebooks, but it was very full and bulky from all the clothes bunched up inside.

“Oh wait, I gotta let Mike know we’re about to head over,” I remembered, rushing back into my room and picking up my Supercom. Will waited out in the hall. I pushed the talk button. “Mike, do you copy?”

A few seconds later, I got a response. “Yeah I copy, Robert. What’s your status? Over.”

“We’re about to bike over to your house. Shouldn’t be more than five minutes or so. Over.”

“Sounds good. Dustin’s already here. Hope you guys are hungry because we ordered a whole lot of pizza. Over.”

“Awesome. Can’t wait. Over and out.” I pushed the antenna down on my Supercom and put it back on my nightstand. After meeting Will again in the upstairs hallway, we ran down the stairs, both of us in a hurry to get over to Mike’s as soon as possible.

“Bye mom, see you tomorrow!” I called out to her after opening the front door. She was in the kitchen, and I could hear the microwave running, so I assumed she was cooking a frozen dinner of some sort.

She popped her head out into the hall and waved at us. “Bye! Have fun and stay safe!”

“Thanks! We will!” I replied.

“Nice seeing you again, Will! Hopefully the next time won’t be as brief!”

“It was really nice to be back! And don’t worry! I’m sure it won’t be!” Will called back.

“Oh and try not to go to bed too late! Karen’s told me all about how much you boys really get into your tabletop games.” While I wasn’t convinced we were even going to play D&D like my mom seemed to think we were, we were very likely to watch a movie or two, and that did have a similar chance of keeping us up late, though with the added caveat that we might end up falling asleep in the middle depending on how late it got.

“We won’t!” we promised. I shut the door behind us and we walked down the steps of my front porch. Our bikes were there waiting for us at the bottom. We hopped on them and began our short trek down Maple toward Mike’s house, both of us eager for a night of pure fun and no drama with our friends.


	3. Steve "The Hair" Harrington

“You’re late!” Dustin declared, approaching Will with his arms folded as the latter pulled up on his bike at the entrance to the Starcourt Mall. The sun was high in the sky, a promising start to a new day — the second of our three-day weekend. Mike, Dustin and I had been waiting around for Will in front of the bike rack off to the left of the front entrance. He had left Mike’s house earlier this morning to go home, take a shower, and change his clothes (since he hadn’t been able to pack any yesterday on account of already being at my place when Mike invited us) as well as grab some snacks for the movie we were about to see. We had all decided to save some money this time and opt out of the overpriced theater fare.

The four of us had just spent the night at Mike’s eating pizza and watching some of our old favorites on VHS until we crashed. It had been a really nice sleepover, all of us grateful to relax after our respective busy days. Mike had been in play rehearsal all day long and would have probably hurled if he had been forced to spend any more time cooped up in our school’s auditorium. Dustin had water polo practice at his usual after school time slot. Will had been at Lovers’ Lake with me earlier in the day, and afterward I had additionally had my tumultuous stint at cross country practice, which I promptly ditched. I think all of us had felt a bit nostalgic for old times throughout the evening, and Lucas’s absence was definitely felt as well, but it had still been a lot of fun and a much needed escape from the realities Will and I had been forced to confront on Halloween night.

The t-shirt prank I tried to pull on Will with my cross country shirt hadn’t exactly gone quite as planned. When he slipped on the t-shirt as we all got changed into our sleepwear, I began to burst out in uncontrollable laughter. Will’s face turned beet red as he demanded to know what was so funny, Mike and Dustin just as lost as my boyfriend. While doing a really poor job of holding back my laughter, I explained to Will the irony of him wearing a Hawkins High Cross Country team t-shirt when he hated running. After hearing my explanation of the joke, Dustin let out a light chortle that I assumed was forced and out of pity, while Mike scratched his head and merely said, “I guess that’s kind of funny.” As for Will, instead of displaying any signs of annoyance or even laughing at his own expense, he calmly and astutely pointed out that him wearing the shirt was supporting the team and therefore me, so he didn’t mind wearing it in the least bit. I was rendered totally speechless by his logic, standing in front of him with my mouth slightly agape while suddenly feeling incredibly stupid. “Good try, buddy,” Dustin patted me on the back trying to console me as my cheeks flushed with embarrassment. Will, seeing my spirits lowered from my prank falling flat on its face, apologized for not having the reaction I had hoped for, which made me feel even worse for wanting it in the first place. I told him to forget about it, that it was a stupid joke and he actually looked really cute wearing it. I wasn’t exactly sure why I had been so crushed by his nonplussed reaction to the prank. Perhaps I had just been looking for a laugh anywhere I could after the traumatic events of Jennifer’s Halloween party and cross country practice yesterday. Or maybe I had been after something deeper — a sense of predicability, things turning out the way I expected them to, since nothing ever seemed to anymore. The failed prank had been the only low point of the sleepover for me, but once we crawled into our sleeping bags and Mike shut the lights off in the basement, the embarrassment I had felt just minutes before began to dissipate into the darkness. Will leaned over from his place on the floor beside me and kissed my cheek to get my attention. “I’m keeping your t-shirt, by the way. It’s cozy. Hope that’s okay with you,” he whispered. Smiling, I leaned in and gave him a quiet peck on the lips and whispered back, “Anything for my number one fan.” I had to admit there was something wholesome about letting Will keep my shirt after I had tried and failed to prank him with it. If it made him happy to wear it, I had no reason to complain.

“No, I’m not! It’s only 11:30!” Will defended himself as he parked his bike at the bike rack. “We’ve still got half an hour before the previews start.”

“We agreed on 11:20. Does punctuality mean nothing to anyone anymore?” Dustin put up his hands and looked to the sky in frustration as Will locked his bike and joined us. Mike and I exchanged a look, both of us finding humor in Dustin’s exasperation at Will’s very insignificant tardiness.

“What’s the big rush anyway? Won’t it be more obvious we’re sneaking in when the theater’s practically empty?” I pointed out to Dustin.

“In case you all forgot, the movie only came out yesterday, so it’s still gonna be packed. And besides, we’re not going in right away because I’m calling a party meeting with Steve first,” Dustin announced.

“What? Why?” Mike’s brow furrowed.

We walked through the sliding doors and entered the mall.

“‘Cause he’ll know how to deal with all the rumors about _them_ floating around school,” Dustin replied, gesturing at Will and me.

I turned to our curly haired friend as we walked past the stores on the way to the escalator. “Is this really necessary, Dustin?”

“Yeah, what does it matter anyway? Pretty much everyone in school knows what we are now,” Will said resignedly.

“Correction— they only _think_ they know. They don’t actually know squat.”

“You really think Steve ‘The Hair’ Harrington is gonna be able to help them?” Mike asked mockingly, believing Dustin’s faith in the older teen was misplaced given the circumstances. “I know he’s a changed man or whatever, but last I checked, didn’t he used to be exactly the kind of mega douche that spreads these kind of rumors?”

“Yeah, and that’s precisely why he’s the perfect guy to ask! Who else would know more about making rumors go away than the guy who once sat on the top of the social food chain at Hawkins High?”

Will and I shrugged while Mike let out an audible sigh. None of us could exactly counter his claim.

“Trust me, guys. He’ll know what to do. He always does,” Dustin assured us as we approached the down escalator.

We squeezed past the people standing on the escalator, each of us saying, “Excuse me” profusely as we did so.

Once we were downstairs the four of us made a bee line for Scoops Ahoy. As we marched inside, we were instantly met with Robin Buckley’s piercing stare, her blue eyes following us as we approached the front counter. She leaned over the cash register in front of her, her arms locked straight and fingers gripping the under side of the countertop. The resigned expression on her face spoke to how well she knew the drill by now. Still she wondered why Steve always put up with and facilitated our antics.

Mike, leading the pack went right up to the counter and dinged the bell repeatedly, his dark brown eyes meeting the older girl’s.

“Hey dingus, your children are here. Again,” Robin announced to her coworker in the back room while keeping her gaze steadily on the four of us in front of her.

Steve opened the sliding glass window over the back counter. “Let me guess: _Freddy’s Revenge_?”

Mike dinged the bell again to confirm Steve was correct.

Seeing Dustin, Steve’s eyes lit up as he remembered he hadn’t talked to his younger friend since before Halloween. “Wait, Henderson! Did you get the girl?”

Dustin grinned. “I got the girl!”

“He got the girl, everyone! He got the girl!” Steve announced to the whole ice cream parlor. A few patrons sitting in various booths turned to stare in total confusion at the raving sailor uniform clad employee. He scampered over to Dustin excitedly, circling around the left side of the front counter and pretending to play a trumpet with his fingers while making a trumpet noise. “Hey! Oh!” Mike, Will and I took a couple of steps back and awkwardly watched as they performed their over the top secret handshake that for some reason involved lightsaber clashing sound effects and pretend guts being spilled. Robin grimaced as she rolled her eyes at her co-worker’s shenanigans, internally dying of secondhand embarrassment.

“So how’d it go down? Tell me everything!” Steve demanded once they finished their handshake.

“I’ll give you all the deets later, I promise. Right now, we’ve got a serious problem on our hands,” Dustin replied, his expression hardening.

Steve’s face fell as he began to worry it was an Upside Down kind of problem.  
______________________________________________________________________________

The four of us were standing around one side of the white table in the middle of the back room of Scoops Ahoy, while Steve stood on the opposite side, arms folded. Will and I had just finished explaining to him the bathroom incident and the rumor going around about us blowing each other.

“So let me get this straight. This guy, this sophomore football dweeb, caught you two walking out of the upstairs bathroom together, right?”

“Yeah,” Will and I both answered.

“But he never actually _saw_ what you two were doing inside the bathroom? Right?”

Will and I shook our heads. “Like I said, I told him I was helping Robert because he threw up, which was technically true,” Will explained, his fingers curling under the shoulder straps of his backpack.

I nodded but kept my eyes downcast, slightly embarrassed he brought up my vomiting a second time.

“Well, if you guys really weren’t doing anything dirty in there, and he didn’t see anything going on, then I’m not sure what you’re so worried about.” Steve shrugged. “I mean lots of guys in high school get called fairies and fags. And the vast majority of them are straight as an arrow. Hell, I used to toss those words around all the time back in the day…. even with your brother, Byers. And look at him now. Him and Nancy still going strong.”

Mike, Will and I scowled at Steve as he casually admitted to his past misdeeds, while Dustin shrugged off his older friend’s blasé attitude toward the subject, having a better understanding of where it came from than any of us.

Steve sighed. “Okay, guys, I get it. I was a real asshole back then, all right? The point is, who cares what they’re saying? Especially since the only evidence they have is total bullshit. Just don’t like, hold hands and kiss in public and stuff, and you guys will be fine. Best thing you can do is ignore the people trying to get you down. Because once they see it getting to you, that only makes them wanna drive that wrench in further. Believe me.”

“Yeah real smart, Dustin, bringing them to ‘King Steve’ for advice. Gee, who would have guessed all they had to do was stand around and take all the harassment and bullying in stride? Who cares that they’re now probably gonna receive a constant barrage of homophobic slurs every day and get slammed up against lockers and punched in the gut by the whole JV football team? Nothing to see here, folks. Let’s get to our movie,” Mike said scathingly.

Steve glared at Mike. “Hey! I don’t appreciate your attitude, Wheeler!”

“He’s only trying to help, Mike,” Will tried to calm the tall raven haired boy down. “Maybe not all that well, but he’s trying.”

Steve looked incredibly unamused.

I turned to Will and smirked, exhaling sharply through my nose. I loved when the occasional sass slipped out of him.

Will smirked back faintly at me in acknowledgement before turning his attention back at the argument unfolding in front of us. “Look, I don’t wanna speak for Robert, but for me it’s not so much the slurs and name calling I’m worried about. I mean, people already call me Zombie Boy, fairy and freak all the time. It doesn’t really phase me anymore. It’s the fact that this false rumor going around puts us in danger and makes bullies like Todd Phillips pay a lot more attention to us than they would have otherwise. If people start to actually believe it — that we’re blowing each other — they’re likely gonna do a whole lot worse than just call us stupid names.”

As I nodded in agreement to Will’s sentiments, I couldn’t help but think back to the events of August the 5th, our self-proclaimed “best day ever.” While the rumor of what we did in the bathroom at Jennifer’s party may have been false, the fact remained that that day we really had done what people were saying we did, and that alone made this whole situation much scarier. I knew I could never allow that particularly dangerous detail to get out. No one could know, not even the other party members (not that I would even want to divulge that kind of information to any of them anyway).

“Come on Steve, don’t you have anything else for them? There’s gotta be something they can do to make the rumors go away,” Dustin beseeched his sailor hat wearing older friend.

Steve shook his head. “There’s nothing they can do but keep their mouths shut and be smart when they’re out in public.”

Will and I frowned in disappointment.

“But…” Steve started to think. “… there might be something _you_ guys can do,” he looked at Dustin and Mike. “The rumor mill is like one giant game of telephone, right? One person says something and it gets twisted and twisted the more people relay it until there’s barely a trace of the original message. But at the end you always get to hear the original message from the guy who started it. If you wanna make things better for them, why don’t you try going to the source and getting that football dweeb Ed to change his tune?”

The four of us looked to each other as we considered Steve’s suggestion. “Huh, that could actually work,” Dustin considered, nodding his head slightly. “Mike, didn’t you say Lucas wanted to spy for us? Maybe he can dig up some dirt on Ed and blackmail him.”

Mike frowned and shook his head. “No, no way! Lucas is out of the party! End of story.”

“Oh come on, Mike! Let it go, already! If it wasn’t for him, Robert and Will would have been licking beer off the floor like a couple of drunk dogs and humiliated even more than they already were. He’s on our side. Not theirs.”

Mike turned to Will and me, hoping we’d take his side in this argument.

“Dustin’s right,” I acknowledged, much to Mike’s chagrin. “No matter what you or even Lucas might think, he’s still one of us.”

Will nodded his head in agreement. “You said it yourself, Mike. Maybe it’s good to have a spy on the inside. It’s like when the shadow monster was in my head, and I was able to spy on it with my now-memories, but this time, no one’s gonna spy back.”

Outnumbered, Mike looked to Steve, who shrugged. “Don’t look at me, Wheeler. He’s _your_ friend, or former friend.”

Mike ran his hands through his voluminous black locks and groaned. “All right, fine. He can spy for us.”

“Mind if I make another suggestion?” Steve requested.

Dustin, Will and I nodded. “Sure, why not?” Mike said flippantly.

“Isn’t El already like super good at spying on people?” Steve said, his eyes landing on Mike. “I seem to recall you complaining a few months ago about the girls spying on you guys in your basement back when El broke up with you. Maybe you could have her use her powers to spy on that dweeb when he’s at home in his room, see if there’s anything worth digging up in there? Bedrooms are always full of secrets.”

“You would know,” Mike mumbled sarcastically.

“Yeah, I would actually,” Steve shot back, resisting the urge to add, ‘and so would your sister’ to avoid Mike’s wrath.

“Wait, that’s genius, Steve!” Dustin exclaimed. “I knew you’d come through!”

“When have I ever failed you, Henderson?” A beat of silence. “Actually, don’t answer that.”

Desperate to leave this meeting he was dragged into, Mike checked his watch. It was five minutes to noon. _Thank god_, he thought to himself. “Oh, would you look at the time? Come on guys. Let’s get out of here before we miss the previews and we all end up having to sit by ourselves.”

“Chill out, Wheeler. It’s a matinee. The only people you’re gonna be competing with for seats are a bunch of grandmas.” Steve said snidely as he headed over to the back door leading into the maintenance hallway behind Scoops and opened it.

“Yeah, ‘cause grandmas are lining up to watch Freddy Kreuger slice and dice a bunch of dumb teenagers,” Mike muttered under his breath as he made his way to the back door.

As Steve stood in the hallway holding the door open for us with his left hand, we all slipped through single file: first Mike, then Will, me and Dustin last.

“Remember guys, if anybody hears about this…” Steve began to warn us for the hundredth time.

“We’re dead!” we all said in unison like a bunch of trained monkeys.

Mike, Will and I went on ahead while Dustin lingered behind to talk to his older confidant. “Hey, Steve.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s your turn now. Go get her.” Dustin gave Steve a couple of pats on the back.

Bemused, Steve watched as the short curly haired teen sped off to catch up with us, his snack filled backpack bouncing up and down as he ran.

“Hey dingus!” Robin’s voice called out from behind him.

Steve spun around and spotted Robin waiting for him by the door to the front part of Scoops, arms folded.

“You done back there?”

He reached his hand under his sailor cap and scratched his head. “Yeah, sorry that took way longer than usual. Sometimes they can be a real handful.” He stepped back into the back room, letting the door to the maintenance hallway close on its own. He walked around the table in the middle of the room toward where Robin was waiting.

Robin smirked. “Sometimes?”

“Okay, all the time,” he chuckled nervously. “There was an awkward beat of silence between the older teens as Steve found himself a bit flustered from Dustin’s words echoing in his head.

“Hey, so umm, I was thinking…” Robin began.

“Oh you’ve been thinking, huh?” Steve teased, cutting her off.

Robin flashed him a slightly annoyed glare. “Yeah, your ‘kids’ going to see the _Nightmare on Elm Street_ sequel gave me an idea…” her face softened a bit, “… maybe after we close up tonight... we could go see it too.”

Steve raised an eyebrow. “You wanna see a movie with _me_?”

“Yeah, that’s what I said, dingus.”

He folded his arms. “I don’t know, I’d have to check my schedule. I’m a pretty busy guy.”

Robin rolled her eyes at Steve’s attempt to play hardball with her. Remembering something, she darted over to her locker and removed her handbag from it. She slung it over her shoulder and dug her hand inside it, pulling out a small ziplock bag with a couple of brownies. Robin waved it in front of him. “Maybe _these_ will change your mind? Just got ‘em yesterday. Never tried one before, but I’ve heard once they kick in, it’s like the best high ever.”

Steve looked puzzled. “Where’d you get those?”

“I know a guy,” Robin said offhandedly. “Who cares? What matters is tonight’s gonna be a real trip. I’m thinking if we close up super fast, maybe skip over some of the inventory counting, we can make it right on time for the 9:30 showing.”

“Gee, Robin. I didn't think you trusted me that much. How do you know I won’t just turn around now and report you to management for stashing those here?”

She scoffed. “Because if there’s one thing for sure, it’s that Steve ‘The Hair’ Harrington is not a narc. Come on, Steve. We work hard. We deserve a night of dumb fun every once in a while.”

Steve considered Robin’s plan for a moment. He had smoked weed a few times with Tommy and Carol back in the day, but had yet to try an edible. The idea intrigued him, especially given the overall monotony of his life as a Scoops Ahoy employee. He was also somewhat curious to see what Robin would be like high. But what really pushed Steve over the edge was Dustin’s encouragement of him just a few minutes ago to woo Robin over. He knew he owed it to himself to at least try to see where the night would take him, especially since she seemed to be reaching out in a way she had never previously. “Okay,” he decided.

Robin raised an eyebrow. “Okay?”

“Yeah, you know I think my schedule just cleared up,” Steve said with a sly smile.

She scoffed. “You’re a real dingus, Steve, you know that?”

Steve smirked. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure you remind me every single day we’re in here. Maybe I should start tallying it on your special white board.”

“Sorry there’s no more room on the board. Too many ‘You Suck’ tallies,” Robin roasted him as she put the ziplock bag back in her handbag and stuck her handbag back in her locker. “Oh, and by the way, it’s your turn to handle the front, so get your butt out there.”

He nodded before straightening his sailor cap and reaching into the scooper holder wrapped around his waist like a cowboy’s gun holster. He pulled out his rubber gripped scooper and twirled it around, catching it with ease. He had come to master this little trick over the many weeks he had slaved away at Scoops Ahoy. “Aye aye, captain,” he muttered sarcastically under his breath as he headed back out to the front.

“What was that?” Robin called out from behind him.

“Nothing!” he said, keeping his head forward and not allowing her to see the smirk plastered on his face.

“That’s what I thought!” Robin let out an audible sigh as she sat down at the table in the back room. Steve had never been the easiest coworker, seemingly always having his mind someplace else, whether it was attempting to flirt with female customers or getting distracted by his “children” that frequently stopped to visit and ask him for advice and favors such as sneaking them into movies. Yet for some reason, she couldn’t find it in herself to give him grief about it. He was just too damn likable, no matter how frustrating he could be sometimes.  
______________________________________________________________________________

When the four of us stepped inside the theater, we determined pretty quickly from how crowded it already was that we wouldn’t be able to all sit together, so we split off in pairs. Mike and Dustin found a couple of empty seats together in the fourth row a bit left from the middle, while Will and I managed to find seats one row behind them but more off to the right.

The previews started right as we settled in. I stuck my backpack on the floor between my feet after taking my seat. After plopping his backpack on the floor Will unzipped it and pulled out a bag of Reeses Pieces out for himself and a box of Red Vines for me. Will had told me right before he left earlier that he’d take care of getting us snacks for the movie, so I didn’t have to worry about grabbing anything extra from Mike’s house. He handed me the Red Vines, which I promptly took and put on my lap. He then reached in and grabbed a couple of cans of Coke Classic, handing me one. I stuck it in my seat’s cupholder. The aluminum surface of the can was only mildly chilly to the touch rather than refrigerator cold by this point.

“Since when do you have Red Vines at your house?” I whispered, surprised he was in possession of my favorite non-chocolate candy.

“I may or may not have stopped on the way to buy some,” he whispered back.

“Will, you really didn’t have to,” I replied, feeling guilty that he had spent money on me. Even though I knew they didn’t cost much, every cent mattered to the Byers family.

“I know, but they’re your favorite. Besides, they’re cheaper at the store than at the theater.”

My heart melted. I really wanted to kiss him right then and there for how thoughtful he had been, but I refrained for obvious reasons. I instead settled for a fond smile. “You’re the best.”

“I know,” he smiled back coyly.

Mike opened his can of Coke Classic, relieved that Coca-Cola had finally given into the consumer protests of New Coke and brought back his favorite soda. After taking a sip, he glanced over at us behind him to make sure we were all right. We each gave him a thumbs up. He placed the can in the cup holder in his seat and turned back toward Dustin, who was sitting to his left. “You really think this whole spying thing is gonna work?” he whispered to our shorter friend. “I mean, what if we don’t find anything? Or that prick’s got nothing to hide?”

“Everyone’s got something,” Dustin assured him before turning his attention back on the screen and taking a sip of his 7-Up can.

Once the previews finished, I decided to check in with Will, given that after we had seen the first _A_ _Nightmare on Elm Street_ he had suffered for at least an entire week from recurring nightmares that involved him trying to escape Freddy Krueger in a twisted Upside Down dreamscape, and it had taken even longer than that initial week for him to be able to sleep with the lights off again. Generally Will loved horror films. In fact, they were his favorite genre, though definitely not mine. A while back all of us in the party (except for El, who still had a lot of catching up to do on movies) made a list of our top 3 desert island movies, and in keeping with his love of horror films, Will had chosen _Evil Dead_, _The Thing_, and _Poltergeist_. In contrast mine had been _Empire Strikes Back_, _Ghostbusters_, and _Raiders of the Lost Ark_, though if I could update my list now I would definitely sub out Ghostbusters and put in _Back to the Future_. I leaned over to my left and whispered, “Hey,” to get his attention.

Will turned to his right to face me.

“You gonna be okay? Watching this after…”

“After last time?” He exhaled sharply through his nose and nodded, looking right into my chocolate brown eyes. “Yeah, I’ll be fine.”

“You sure?”

His lips curled into a slight smile. “Of course.”

He seemed confident enough. The last thing I wanted to do was make him uncomfortable and believe I was doubting his ability to handle the movie, so I decided not to press the issue any further. But the truth was while I wanted to believe he’d be totally fine and hopefully even be raving about the movie afterward if it ended up being any good, I couldn’t help but be worried about him. The whole premise of these films, which revolved around an evil spirit invading teenagers’ dreams and killing them, hit a lot closer to home for Will than he would ever admit, certainly more so than those of other horror films he enjoyed. Still, I had to accept his answer. It was ultimately his decision to make. I nodded a bit. “Okay.” We both turned back toward the screen, the movie finally starting.


	4. High Times at Starcourt Mall

I remember thinking right after the movie finished and the credits started rolling about how _A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge_ had really spoken to me on a level that I had not at all expected. It was strange since it was hardly the best movie I’d ever seen, not even close. There was just something about it that stood out compared to other movies I’d seen, mainly concerning the main character, Jesse Walsh, a teenager who becomes possessed by the spirit of Freddy Kreuger and forced to commit horrific acts of violence. His role as the protagonist was remarkably unusual for this genre because most slasher films before this one had a girl as the protagonist or so-called “scream queen.” The first _Nightmare on Elm Street_ had Nancy Thompson, whose family previously owned the house Jesse’s family moves into in the beginning of this film. _Halloween_ had Laurie Strode, and _Friday the 13th_ had Alice. Additionally, Jesse was unlike most male protagonists I had seen in other films. He wasn’t macho; he wasn’t stoic. He wasn’t even cool — quite the opposite, frankly. He was vulnerable, scared and constantly anxious — feelings that were deemed by society to be unmanly and sissy-like, feelings that I too struggled to repress in myself, especially when in public.

With Jesse fighting in the first half of the film to stay awake out of fear that Freddy would come to him in his dreams and take over his body, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the most traumatic week of my life — the week when Will went missing two years ago. I had constantly feared the worst and refused to sleep because every time I did, I’d have these horrible nightmares about him turning up dead, which were exacerbated by it actually happening when the state troopers found his body (later revealed to be fake, of course). Hell, I’d even attended his funeral. I had also starved myself because my nerves had been so high that I was sure I’d throw up whatever I ate. The only thing I remember keeping me going that week was the possibility that Will was still alive, which had been posited by Mike to the party and encouraged by El. Although I had been a complete emotional wreck at the time, I had tried my hardest not to show it too much because my fears of losing Will were so explicitly tied to being in love with him, and the last thing I’d wanted was for Mike, Dustin, Lucas or even El to catch on.

But it wasn’t until Will turned to me while the credits were still rolling and whispered, “So Jesse’s gay, right?” that it really dawned on me why his character and the film overall resonated with me so much. Though it hadn’t immediately clicked for me that Jesse was most likely in the closet, the more I sat there and thought about it, the more I realized that Will was most likely totally correct in his assumption. To me, the most obvious piece of evidence to support Jesse being a closet case was a sequence where he and his friend Lisa are making out at her pool party and about to have sex. Freddy begins to take over Jesse’s body, causing Jesse to panic and flee to his new friend Grady’s bedroom. Once there Jesse with his shirt still unbuttoned immediately thrusts himself onto Grady in his bed, desperately begging his friend to stay up and watch him sleep and prevent him from leaving the room. In response, Grady jokes that Jesse wants to sleep with him instead of his girlfriend Lisa. Instead of trusting Lisa to understand what was happening to him and let her help him like she offered to repeatedly, Jesse ditches her for his newer male friend, whom he had recently bonded with earlier in the detention they both received for wrestling each other during a baseball game in gym class. That earlier scene of them fighting on the baseball field was in retrospect pretty homoerotic, especially considering Grady had instigated their fight by pantsing Jesse and exposing his bare buttocks to his classmates, but I hadn’t explicitly thought about it that way while watching it. Overall Jesse’s struggle to contain the threat of Freddy emerging from within did seem like a pretty apt metaphor for the repression of his own latent homosexuality. And Jesse somehow stumbling into a S&M leather bar (again with his shirt unbuttoned) in the middle of the night and his embarrassing dance in his bedroom certainly don’t detract from this interpretation of a character struggling with his sexual identity.

“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever related so much to a character in a movie as I have to Jesse,” Will confessed to me a mere moment later.

I nodded in agreement. “Yeah, I don’t think I have either,” I replied, though I believed it was even more true for Will, considering that in addition to both of them being gay, he and Jesse had dealt with malevolent forces taking over their bodies and using them to their own malicious ends. I wondered if Mike or Dustin had also picked up on any of the homosexual subtext of the movie, or if it had completely gone over their heads.  
______________________________________________________________________________

“How’s the inventory looking?” Steve popped his head into the back room, where Robin was kneeling on the ground counting stock in the back freezer. With Scoops Ahoy having closed for business a little more than fifteen minutes ago, the two teens were now trying their hardest to quickly clean up and lock up so they could make their 9:30 showing of _Freddy’s Revenge_.

Robin turned her neck to look at Steve. “We’ve only got one more barrel of U.S.S. Butterscotch, Black Cherry, and Salted Caramel each, but we’re getting another shipment on Monday so hopefully we won’t run out before then.”

“But U.S.S. Butterscotch is like our third most popular flavor,” Steve pointed out.

Robin stood up and shut the freezer door. “If we run out tomorrow, then people will just have to make do with the seventeen other flavors we have. How’s it going out front? All the booths cleaned up and counters wiped down?”

Steve nodded, mop in hand. “Yup.”

“Did you put the register drawer away in the safe?”

“Yup. Only thing left to do is close the front gate.”

Robin smiled. “Awesome.” As Steve stepped inside the back room and put the mop and bucket he’d been using away in the supply closet, Robin scurried over to her locker and grabbed her saddle brown sling bag out of her locker. She pulled out the zip lock bag containing the pot brownies. “It’s time,” she announced giddily with a smirk.

Steve looked at her funny. “What, you wanna do this here?”

“Where else, dingus? We gotta get a head start or the movie’ll be almost over before we even feel anything. Remember they might take up to an hour to kick in.” She pulled out a brownie and handed it to him.

Steve took the brownie from her and examined it closely. It smelled a little funny, certainly not like any brownie he’d eaten before. “So, do we eat the whole thing or what?”

Robin nodded as she pulled hers out and stuffed the empty zip lock back into her bag. “Yeah, whole thing.”

Without any further hesitation, he took a bite of his brownie, chewing it for a moment before swallowing. It tasted like someone had unrolled a joint and dumped the contents into the brownie batter, though that was definitely not how they were really made. Marijuana and chocolate was an odd combination to say the least. “It’s a little… earthy,” Steve commented.

Robin swallowed her first bite. “There’s pot in it, what’d you expect?”

“I guess I wasn’t expecting it to be so… overpowering,” Steve replied as Robin took another bite. “I can barely taste any chocolate.”

Steve’s critique of the pot brownie made Robin roll her eyes. “Just eat up, Betty Crocker. We’re gonna be late.”

He took one more bite, chewed it and swallowed it before cramming the rest in his mouth.

Robin finished hers not long afterward. “Now we wait,” she said, the slightest frown on her face betraying the anxiety she secretly felt over how the special brownies she’d bought from a classmate were going to affect the two of them.

They proceeded to exit out of the back room of Scoops to the front of the store. Robin stuck both their hats in her bag at Steve’s behest. Steve never brought a bag or backpack to work, so he would typically just fold his hat flat and clutch it on his way in and out, minimizing the amount of time he had to cover his perfectly coiffed hair. The metal roll-up gate at the entrance was about halfway down to the floor. Both of them ducked under it. Once they were through, Steve rolled it down the rest of the way to the floor and secured the padlock.

It was already a bit past 9:30, so the two Scoops Ahoy uniform clad teens practically sprinted up the escalators and all the way to the movie theater — undoubtedly a ridiculous sight to behold. They arrived at the box office, panting. Fortunately there was no line at the time, so they went right up to the desk.

“Two tickets for _Nightmare_,” Steve requested of the similarly aged dorky teenage boy behind the ticket window as he pulled out a wad of singles from his wallet.

Robin tapped him on the arm. Steve turned to his right and was met with a disapproving look. “What are you doing?” she questioned him between deep breaths.

“Buying us tickets,” Steve replied, somewhat confused.

“I can buy my own,” she protested.

“Don’t I like, owe you?”

Robin stared at him like he was nuts.

“You know… for the _brownie_?” he said between gritted teeth, trying to be subtle but instead just being totally awkward.

The dorky boy, whose name tag read “Allan” and was also a senior at Hawkins High like Robin, looked on as the pair squabbled about who was paying for whom.

Relenting, Robin sighed. “Fine. But if you really wanna insist on paying me back, just know it’s gonna take a lot more than one movie ticket.”

The two Scoops employees were testing Allan's patience. “Six dollars, please,” he chimed in, his voice nasally.

Steve handed him six singles. Allan took them and counted them. He then slid two ticket stubs under the glass. “Theater One. Enjoy your movie,” he said unenthusiastically.

“Thanks,” Robin smiled politely at her classmate. She and Steve headed inside the theater after pocketing their ticket stubs. They passed by the snack counter, both of them deciding to forgo purchasing any snacks to save money as well as make sure they weren’t missing the movie.

Entering Theater One in near darkness, Steve and Robin noticed immediately how packed it was. The previews had just finished and the “Our Feature Presentation” logo appeared on the screen.

“Just in time,” Robin whispered, sounding relieved.

“Look,” Steve pointed to a couple of empty seats next to each other three rows from the back and about four seats from the right aisle, the only visible pair together. “Pretty sure those seats have our names on them.”

Robin nodded. The pair awkwardly squeezed past the people in the row with the free seats. They sat down just in time for the New Line Cinema logo to fade and the ominous score chiming in and fade into the opening shot of a school bus turning onto a suburban street.

_Now we wait_, Steve thought, echoing Robin’s earlier statement. Though he wouldn’t admit it, he was also little nervous about how the brownie would affect him. He had enjoyed getting high with Tommy H. And Carol in the past, but this was different. Robin was different, nothing like his stuck-up friends from high school. She was the most genuine girl he knew, which was why Steve’s biggest fear right now was acting even more like the dingus Robin already seemed to think he was while potentially stoned out of his mind. He was finally on what appeared to be a date with her, and she had even been the one to ask him, though neither of them had officially used the term. He wasn’t exactly sure what this was. Maybe it wouldn’t matter once they were high, but right now, sitting in the theater next to Robin, it was all he could think about.  
______________________________________________________________________________

For the first thirty minutes or so, the movie didn’t really hold much interest for Steve. The main character was a whiny dork and the scares were practically nonexistent. He hadn’t exactly been the biggest fan of the first one either when that came out last year, but at least then it had been fresh. It wasn’t until Jesse Walsh stumbled into what appeared to be an S&M leather bar, that Steve found himself mesmerized by what was on the big screen. He marveled at how the blood red colored lights inside the bar bounced off the screen and saturated the entire auditorium, as though transporting him and everyone else watching the movie into the bar with Jesse and all the scantily clad oddballs floating around it. “What’s happening?” he mumbled, lifting his left arm up and observing how the red light tinged his pale skin and made the hairs on his forearm shine.

“I have no idea,” Robin replied, her voice as well as the film’s audio sounding extremely distant to Steve, like it was coming from the other end of a long corridor.

Everything on screen and around him seemed to be moving in slow motion yet somehow also really quickly, like frames were being skipped. Before Steve knew it, some older guy had accosted Jesse at the bar that seemed familiar and Jesse was back at school in the middle of the night running laps around the gym.

A couple of minutes later and Jesse’s gym teacher, Coach Schneider, who had caught Jesse in the bar about to have a beer, was now getting assaulted by balls and other gym equipment in his office as Jesse was showering after running laps for punishment. Steve and Robin stared at the screen in amazement as basketballs, tennis balls and dumbbells flew around the office and Coach Schneider was dragged to the showers by a pair of autonomous jumprope.

Steve and Robin burst out laughing at the sight of the gym teacher being strung up against the shower pipes, stripped naked by an invisible force and spanked with a towel. A couple of members of the audience sitting around the two Scoops employees shot them annoyed glances.

“This is so weird,” Robin whispered giddily.

“Super weird,” Steve agreed, his bloodshot eyes remaining glued to the screen.

“Why is he naked?” she giggled.

“Who knows?"

Steam filled the showers and Jesse, who had been watching his gym teacher be tortured from afar, was replaced by Freddy Krueger, who now marched toward the gym teacher. “Holy shit!” Robin squealed a little too loudly.

“Shhhh!” The man on the other side of Robin gave her a dirty look.

“Sorry, Dad,” Robin whispered back mockingly. Steve snickered at Robin’s sarcastic apology, and Robin snorted in response. The man groaned to himself, starting to become fed up with the two.

Onscreen Freddy slashed Coach Schneider from behind, killing him.

The events of this dreamlike sequence left Steve entirely confused. He wondered how Jesse and this leather clad guy who appeared to be his gym teacher ended up in a locker room shower, and was entirely lost as to what happened to Jesse until Jesse reappeared in the foggy showers with Freddy’s bladed glove on his hand. “What the hell?” he muttered aloud in total confusion. As he spoke, Steve instantly noticed his mouth was bone dry. He tried to salivate to no effect. Realizing he was thirsty and way too stoned to process the movie, he turned to Robin. “I…I think I’m gonna go grab a sip of water from the fountain outside. Wanna come?” he whispered in a slur.

Robin’s bloodshot eyes met his. She nodded enthusiastically. “It’s like you read my mind. Like... I don’t think I’ve ever been so thirsty in my life,” she chuckled, her words also slurring together.

The pair got up and squeezed past the people on the edge of their row, who were glad to see them go so they could watch in peace. “Dumb teenagers,” the irritated man who’d been sitting on the other side of Robin muttered under his breath.

They exited the theater and sloppily raced over to the water fountain. Steve managed to get there first, much to Robin’s chagrin. He dunked his head over the fountain and pressed down on the button next to the spout. For about five seconds or so, he gulped at the stream of cold water coming out of the fountain, Robin meanwhile leaning up against the poster on the wall for _Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge_ waiting for him to finish. Steve lifted his head up slightly away from the stream. “That’s amazing,” he mumbled, his throat sounding a little wet from having just finished swallowing a gulp. He lowered his head back down and continued to hydrate.

“So, like, I wasn’t _totally_ focused in there or anything, but… I’m pretty sure… that kid just murdered his gym teacher,” Robin surmised.

Steve craned his neck toward her, still pressing down on the fountain button and letting the water flow. “Wait, wait, the older guy from that weird bar was Jesse’s gym teacher?”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure,” Robin replied.

“So who’s dream was it? Jesse’s or the gym teacher’s?”

“I think they were both awake.”

Steve snickered softly. “But I thought Freddy’s whole schtick was killing people in their sleep.”

“It is, but it looks like now he’s figured out a way to kill people in the real world by somehow taking over Jesse’s body. So because Freddy was possessing Jesse in the locker room showers, technically… Jesse still killed his gym teacher.”

Still letting the fountain run, Steve stared off into the lobby of the theater with his mouth agape as he tried to make sense of Robin’s explanation. She could practically see the gears turning in his head, but her stoned friend was thoroughly lost. “Wh… what?”

“No, no, it’s my turn. You’ve had enough,” Robin moaned, shoving Steve away from the fountain. She grunted contentedly as she slurped from the fountain.

Bored, Steve aimlessly wandered off into the empty theater lobby as he waited for Robin to finish drinking from the fountain. Something high above immediately grabbed his attention. He craned his neck upward, staring up at the ceiling in awe, his mouth agape and his hands grasping the bottom of his shirt. He slowly let go of his shirt and let his arms droop to his sides. “Wow,” he mumbled, the sound of his voice echoing psychedelically in his head. The rest of the mall was much dimmer now than it normally was, since only the movie theater was still open. As a result the light coming from the large neon Starcourt logo had a much stronger effect than usual on the space, casting everything in a cool blue hue. But it was the grid of lights on the rafters above that really dazzled Steve. They shone down on him in elongated beams, twinkling and pivoting back and forth gently. The effect was a bit similar to a laser show at a rock concert but much slower and more ethereal. “Hey, Robin,” he called to her, still staring at the ceiling. He motioned her to come over with his hand.

A curious Robin looked up toward Steve as she continued to sip audibly from the fountain.

“You gotta check this out.”

Robin immediately stopped drinking and quickly joined Steve. She let out a light grunt as she craned her neck up at the ceiling, taken aback by the striking view above.

“Check this… this… ceiling, it’s beautiful.” Steve said softly, pointing at the lights.

Robin’s mouth was agape as she stared wide-eyed at the lights above. “Oh, wow.” She chuckled, tilting her neck sideways as she spun around. “Oh.” The lights seemed to multiply, becoming as numerous as the stars in the night sky. They glistened and gleamed in a blurry beautiful mess, the long streaks of light crisscrossing and overlapping with each other. It made both her and Steve start to feel dizzy, Robin finding herself stumbling a bit. Amidst her admiration, she was able to piece together that the high she and Steve were experiencing was something completely out of the ordinary, much more potent than any weed either of them had ever smoked. It was sensational — transcendental even.

To the pair, the Starcourt Mall ceiling was no longer recognizable, instead replaced by thousands of small dots of blue light twinkling around in a slow waving motions and numerous thin lines of golden light running parallel to each other and bending around. The lights began to rapidly spiral past them, Steve feeling like he and Robin were soaring through space at light speed like the Millennium Falcon.

Steve grunted again, while Robin clutched her stomach. Both of them realizing they were about to throw up, they sprinted into the same bathroom, neither knowing nor caring which gender bathroom it was. Robin took the first stall on the left wall while Steve took the next one over to the right. They got down on their knees and puked their guts out into the toilets of their respective stalls, both of them bracing themselves by clutching the black toilet seat. The sounds of retching, coughing and spitting filled the otherwise empty movie theater bathroom.

Sitting on the floor with his right arm now draped over the back of the toilet seat, Steve flushed the contents of his stomach away. Afterward he lifted his left knee up and leaned his left forearm on it while letting out a faint groan. Next door, Robin was lying on the floor with her arms spread out like a cross and her legs leaning up against the stall door that was open inward. The soles of her red Converse sneakers were parallel to the ceiling.

Robin broke the post-vomit silence between the two teens. “The ceiling stopped spinning for me,” she said, gazing upward. “Is it still spinning for you?”

Steve looked up at the ceiling to check. “Holy shit… No,” he replied. “So, umm... what exactly was in those brownies anyway? Because it sure as hell was not just pot.”

Robin shrugged. “Who knows? Shrooms? Acid?”

“You’re telling me you gave us acid-laced pot brownies?”

“I don’t know what else was in them. But whatever it was, it was some _really_ trippy shit, let me tell you,” she giggled.

“Yeah, no kidding,” Steve laughed with her for a moment before letting out an audible sigh. “You think we puked it all up?”

Robin shrugged. “Maybe. Ask me something... something I’d never tell you while sober. Then we’ll know for sure.”

“Okay. Something you’d never tell me while sober. Sure. Um…” He shifted his body closer to the back of the toilet, leaning against it. “Have you ever, uh, done something really crazy... like totally against code while working at Scoops?”

Robin smiled gleefully, still staring up at the bathroom ceiling. “My first week aboard, I thought it’d be a really good idea to stick my mouth right under the hot fudge dispenser when no one was looking and help myself to a pump or two.”

Steve laughed. “Oh, my God. What?”

She lowered her legs back onto the floor. “I burned my tongue so bad,” Robin giggled, “I talked like this the whole rest of the day,” she said while grabbing her tongue to make herself sound like her tongue was swollen.

“Yeah, it’s definitely still in her system,” he remarked.

Both teens laughing, Robin sat up and scooted back against the tile wall on the left side of the stall, her right foot pressing up against the stall divider wall. “Oh…” she sighed. “All right, my turn.”

“Okay. Hit me,” Steve replied, wincing a bit as he rubbed his eyes with his left hand and grasped the front of the black toilet seat cover with his right hand.

Robin ran her left hand through her dirty blonde hair, pushed it back and scratched the left side of her head, letting her fingers run down a strand of hair before letting go. “Have you… ever been in love?”

Steve bit his lip, not at all prepared for _that_ topic to come up between them now of all times. “Yep. Nancy Wheeler. First semester, senior year,” he answered. He made a finger gun with his right thumb, index and middle fingers and imitated a gunshot sound, chuckling lightly afterward. His right hand landed back on the toilet seat cover.

“Oh, my God,” Robin groaned in disbelief. “She’s such a priss.”

“Hm. Turns out, not really.”

Robin scoffed. “Are you still in love with Nancy?”

Steve shook his head. “No.”

“Why not?”

“I think it’s because I found someone who’s a little bit better for me,” he replied, surprised by his own forwardness. If he was doing this, this was as good of a time as any.

Intrigued, Robin stared at the wall separating the two teens, her lips parted.

“It’s crazy…” Steve continued. “Earlier while Dustin was telling me what happened at that Halloween party they all went to, it started to hit me that the student had somehow become the teacher. ‘It’s your turn now,’ he kept saying. ‘Go get her. Go get your Jennifer.’”

Robin’s face scrunched up in confusion. “Wait, who’s Jennifer?”

“You know Michelle Hayes?”

Robin rolled her eyes. Who didn’t know Michelle Hayes? “Uh huh.”

“Her younger sister Jennifer is in Dustin’s year. Apparently she’s his girlfriend now.”

“Oh wow, good for him,” Robin said, sounding genuinely impressed.

“To be honest with you, I’m not even 100% sure it’s legit. But that’s not — that’s not really the point. That doesn’t matter. The point is, this girl, you know, the one that I like… it’s somebody that I… didn’t even talk to in school.

Next door, Robin listened to Steve, a pained expression on her face.

“And I don’t even know why,” Steve continued on. “Maybe ‘cause Tommy H. would’ve made fun of me or… I wouldn’t be… prom king. It’s stupid. I mean, Dustin’s right, it’s all just a bunch of bullshit anyways. Because, when I think about it, I should’ve been hanging out with this girl the whole time. First of all, she’s hilarious. She’s so funny. I feel like, these past few months, I have laughed harder than I have laughed… in a really long time. And she’s smart.”

Robin cracked a faint smile.

“Way smarter than me. You know, if it wasn’t for her, I’d probably have been, like, fired by now for breaking some b.s. company policy I didn’t even know existed, and…”

Her eyes downcast, she pursed her lips together and took her right foot off the stall door, placing it back on the floor next to her left. She leaned forward a bit, and hugged her knees.

“…you know? She’s honestly unlike anyone I’ve ever even met before.”

Robin buried her head in her lap. This confession was not at all what she had expected from him. She started to feel like she had bitten off way more than she could chew with her seemingly innocent question.

“Robin?” Steve tapped on the stall divider between them.

She peeked her head up from her lap and glanced over in his direction.

“Robin, did you just OD in there?”

“No,” she sighed. “I… am still alive.” Robin leaned back against the wall, resting her palms on the ground on either side of her. She let out another deep sigh.

Wanting to talk face to face, Steve scooted under the stall divider feet first into Robin’s stall, his blue Adidas sneakers squeaking as they slid across the tile floor.

“The floor’s disgusting,” Robin remarked as Steve plopped himself against the stall door and pushed his feet against the tile wall, his position mirroring Robin’s.

Steve looked down at his chest. “Yeah, well, I already got a bunch of puke on my shirt, so…”

Robin chuckled a bit.

“What do you think?”

Robin looked him right in the eyes. “About?”

“This girl.”

“She sounds awesome.”

“She is awesome. And what about the guy?”

“I think he’s on drugs, and he’s not thinking straight.”

Steve looked off to his left. “Really? ‘Cause I think he’s thinking a lot more clearly than usual,” he said, his eyes landing on hers.

“He’s not.” Robin assured him lightly but firmly. Her throat welled up. “Look… he doesn’t even know this girl. And if he did know her, like — like really know her, I don’t think he’d even want to be her friend.” Robin looked off to her left, unable to meet Steve’s eyes now.

Steve shook his head and leaned forward, his arms folded over his knees. “No, that’s not true. No way is that true.”

“Listen to me, Steve. It’s shocked me to my core, but I like you,” she smiled at him. “I really like you. That’s why I invited you to get high and go see that stupid movie with me tonight. But I’m not like your other friends. And I’m not like Nancy Wheeler.”

“Robin, that’s exactly why I like you.”

She scoffed.

“Do you remember when I asked you about Mrs. Click’s sophomore history class?”

Steve nodded a bit. “Yeah, wasn’t much after the Fourth of July, right?”

“The day before you’d ditched work for some mysterious reason and left me doing double duty the rest of the day.”

Steve hung his head low, recalling how we had called him that day with our emergency mission to rescue Lucas from the hospital. He had never told Robin the real reason why he left so suddenly since it related to the Upside Down stuff. “Yeah, I’m really sorry about that.”

“It’s fine, Steve. I really couldn’t care less at this point. Back then, though, I couldn’t help but think about how much of an asshole you’d always been, and how there you were proving me right. It was like... you lived in your own little world, and no one outside of it mattered. Do you remember what I said to you that day? About me being jealous and, like, obsessed?”

He nodded gently. “Yeah.”

“It wasn’t because I had a crush on you.” Robin took a breath. “It’s because… she wouldn’t stop staring at you.”

“Mrs. Click?”

Robin shut her eyes, chuckling a bit. She looked down at the floor for a moment, the name struggling to escape her lips. “Tammy Thompson.”

Steve brow furrowed.

“I wanted her to look at _me_. But… she couldn’t pull her eyes away from you and your stupid hair. And I didn’t understand, because you would get bagel crumbs all over the floor. And you asked dumb questions. And you were a douchebag. And — And you didn’t even like her and… I would go home… and just scream into my pillow.”

“But Tammy Thompson’s a girl.”

“Steve,” Robin whispered softly.

“Yeah?”

Robin just stared at him, hoping he would get it and she wouldn’t have to spell it out for him.

Steve stared back at her curiously. Robin could practically see the gears turning in his head. “Oh,” he mumbled finally.

“Oh,” Robin repeated. She scoffed, looking down to her left.

“Holy shit,” Steve exclaimed, finally understanding what it was she was trying to tell him. He sat back as he tried to process it all.

“Yeah,” Robin sighed. “Holy shit.” She looked up at the ceiling and then at the floor in front of her, too nervous to see how Steve was taking her confession.

Steve leaned back against the stall door staring directly at the tile wall in front of him. He was devastated. It had taken him months to finally acknowledge to himself that he had a crush on Robin. He’d tried his hardest to become a better person since high school, for Dustin and his friends, for Robin, as well as for himself. And it seemed like he had finally succeeded tonight, since Robin had gone from barely tolerating him at work during the summer to now actually wanting to spend time with him outside of Scoops. While admittedly the night had so far unfolded quite unpredictably, he had enjoyed every second of it (outside of the puking, of course) and could tell she had too. But now here she was telling him she couldn’t like him back the same way he liked her, not because she just didn’t happen to have feelings for him, but because it was impossible for her to have feelings toward him or any other guy for that matter (or at least that was what he had to assume, since she might not have bothered saying anything at all if she liked both girls and guys). It was like some cruel twist of fate — the universe mocking him for thinking he could finally have a win after Nancy dumped him.

Still, despite his disappointment, Steve couldn’t help but feel honored that Robin would admit something so vulnerably personal to him. He was certain no one else knew her secret, and that instilled in Steve a sense of real importance. It must have been true after all, what she said before — she did really like him. He mattered to her, and for that, he was grateful.

“Steve…” Robin broke the silence between them. “Did you OD over there?”

Steve stared down at the ground, a faint smile crept across his face. “No, I just, uh… just thinking.”

Robin played with a strand of her hair. “Okay,” she whispered back.

“I mean, yeah. Tammy Thompson, you know, she’s cute and all, but… I mean, she’s a total dud.”

Robin gave him a disapproving look. “She’s not.”

“Yes, she is. She wants to be, like, a singer. She wants to move to, like, Nashville and shit.”

“She has dreams.”

“She can’t even hold a tune.”

Robin rolled her eyes and smiled at him, her mouth hanging wide open.

Steve continued on. “She’s practically tone-deaf. Have you heard her?”

Robin chuckled.

“All the time.” Steve started to sing "Total Eclipse of the Heart" atonally: “♪ _You see me now tonight_ ♪”

“Shut up,” she laughed.

“♪ _You see me_… ♪”

“She does not sound like that,” Robin protested.

“She sounds exactly— that’s a great impersonation of her.”

“She does not sound like that,” she repeated. “You sound like a Muppet.”

“_She_ sounds like a Muppet,” Steve laughed. “She sounds like a Muppet giving birth.”

Robin burst out laughing.

Sounding like Kermit the Frog, Steve started to sing again. “♪ _And if you could hold me tight_… ♪”

“♪ _We’ll be holding on forever_ ♪” they both sang together.

“Exactly!” Steve grinned.

Robin laughed. “I know!”

They sat there together on the floor of the bathroom stall just laughing for an entire minute. And during that glorious minute, a cathartic sense of relief washed over the pair as Steve Harrington and Robin Buckley both realized they had made true friends in one another.

Steve composed himself. “You know, I think… things can only get better now.”

Robin raised an eyebrow, recognizing the title of a popular radio hit Steve might or might not have been referencing. “Oh yeah, Howard Jones? And why’s that?”

“‘Cause you’re not alone,” Steve replied in a matter of fact way.

She scoffed. “Of course I’m not. You’re here cramped on the floor of this disgusting bathroom stall with me.”

Steve chuckled a bit, his lips curling into a slight smile. “I’m serious, Robin. You’re not alone,” he reiterated more deliberately.

Puzzled by his earnestness, the younger teen frowned. “W-what are you talking about?”

“There’re a couple of people I think you should meet,” he said, smiling even more now.

Robin’s eyes lit up as she stared at Steve, her curiosity now piqued.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the long hiatus! I've been sitting on this chapter for a while partially because it took some extra research and lots of tooling of the iconic Season 3 Steve and Robin bathroom scene to fit into the context of my fic (I just love that scene so much and really wanted to find a way to include it because I can't imagine Robin coming out to Steve in any other way) and partially because of life getting in the way. 
> 
> I have my next chapter pretty much outlined in my head so I hope that one doesn't take as long to publish! Thank you all for sticking with this fic! It means the world to me. See you all in 2020!


	5. Not Alone

I asked my mom to pour me a cup of coffee this morning for the first time ever. Up until today, I had always steered clear of the stuff. Though my mom was an avid coffee drinker and practically required the hot black liquid to function, I’d never heard anyone describe coffee as particularly tasty. It always seemed like something adults drank and barely tolerated in order to keep themselves awake throughout the day. My mom would have multiple cups in a day — at least three, sometimes four or five if she stayed at her office past normal working hours. I was pretty sure she was addicted.

The look on her face when I asked her for coffee had not been one of surprise like I had expected. Instead my mom merely raised an eyebrow and smirked at me, suggesting that she had probably suspected I would ask. To be fair, she had been fully aware of how late I had stayed up last night finishing the copious amount of homework that I had put off the first two days of the weekend and of course given me crap for it. I told her I wouldn’t make a habit of putting off my assignments, even though that was probably untrue.

Much to my chagrin, the long weekend had flown by way too fast. It was now the morning of Monday, November 4th. Sunday hadn’t been a particularly eventful day. My mom went to her usual book club, while I spent my time studying and working on my assignments. Will came over to my house briefly in the mid-afternoon to study for our vocabulary test. I also helped him study for his geometry test on triangles, which in turn helped me familiarize myself with them before my similar test at the end of the week — a win-win for both of us. I had invited Mike to study with us as well, but he turned me down because El had begged Hopper to allow Mike to come over to their cabin to help her with her homework. Hopper relented and agreed, provided he supervise so as to ensure there’d be no funny business between the couple. Fortunately for all three of them, Hopper had the day off.

Since today was the first day of school in what seemed like forever, and I had gotten all too used to waking up well past nine in the morning, having to wake up at seven again really did a number on me. I found myself barely able to crawl out of bed, everything in me fighting to stay under the covers and keep my eyes shut just a few minutes more. While showering, the stream of hot water massaging the back of my neck had felt so soothing that I found myself standing in the tub daydreaming and nodding off while losing precious minutes of my morning routine.

While the biggest culprit of my sleep deprivation had of course been my procrastinative habits, I was also harboring a lot of anxiety over going back to school, and that anxiety had kept me up most of the night. I had woken up every hour or two in a cold sweat, panicking and breathing heavily. Although Will and I reuniting had sweetened the idea of school again, I hadn’t heard from Max all weekend, Jack was now no longer my friend, and based on what I overheard during cross country practice on Friday, rumors seemed to be spreading about Will and me in the bathroom at Jennifer’s Halloween party.

So because I really didn’t want to risk dozing off and crashing my bike while riding to school, I drank my first cup of coffee. I tried a sip of it black first and immediately grimaced, almost spitting it out because it was so bitter. My mom took it black but told me most people put milk or cream in it and sometimes sugar too. I poured some low fat milk in, which was my usual choice of morning beverage, and it suddenly became much more tolerable. I still didn’t love it, but it was at least drinkable. I could hardly imagine drinking the stuff regularly.

I decided to bring my Walkman along with me to school and listen to some music on my ride over, figuring it’d be next to impossible to fall asleep listening to some upbeat music. If nothing else it’d pump me up a bit. After putting on my headphones, I pressed the play button on the Walkman and stuffed it in my backpack, the headphone wire coming out of the zipper and giving me just enough slack that it wouldn’t snag while riding. “Open the Door” by Gentleman Afterdark started playing as I pedaled off my driveway and down the street. I sang along with the lyrics as I rode.

Will, Mike, and Dustin were already waiting at the bike rack when I arrived on campus about ten minutes later. El had yet to show up.

“There he is!” Dustin called out triumphantly at my arrival.

I parked my bike at a vacant section of the rack and locked it. I pulled my headphones off and hung them around my neck, the wire still dangling into my backpack.

“Hey,” Will beamed.

“Hey,” I smiled back at him. I looked around at everyone. “So anyone else not wanna get up today or just me?”

“Pretty sure none of us did,” Mike chuckled. “But hey, at least El’s not grounded anymore.”

“How was she yesterday?” I asked.

“Bored as hell and sick of soap operas,” Mike replied.

_Guess there wasn’t really wasn’t much else for El to do in that cabin other than watch TV_, I thought to myself.

“Hey, that’s Hopper pulling up right now,” Will pointed out Hopper’s Chevy Blazer driving up to the curb. We all hurried over to the car drop off area. El got out of her dad’s SUV and waved him off. Hopper sped away.

“El!” Mike shouted, running up to her. Dustin, Will and I followed at a slower pace.

El turned toward our direction. “Mike!”

They met halfway running into each others’ arms. They shared a kiss on the lips. Both of us feeling awkward, Will and I looked away. “Get a room you two!” Dustin shouted jokingly at the couple.

Mike and El separated as we caught up with them. Unamused, Mike folded his arms and glared at Dustin. “In case you forgot, Dustin, I haven’t seen my girlfriend since Halloween except for yesterday when Hopper was constantly watching us like a hawk while we studied.”

“Oh my god, three whole days without kissing each other. What a tragedy, what a real tragedy that is,” Dustin mocked him. “Imagine going a whole month without it, like these two did,” Dustin said, eying Will and me. Both of us turned beet red at the mention of us being together while in public.

“Well fortunately, I don’t have to,” Mike retorted.

“Well fortunately, I don’t have to because El and I smooch every day between classes and ten times a day on weekends,” Dustin mocked him again.

Mike scowled at him. “Wow, real mature, Dustin.”

El rolled her eyes. Dustin’s (and Lucas’s when he was still in the party) teasing never bothered her, and though she knew Mike could get a little overly defensive sometimes, she found it kind of cute.

“El, you must be relieved to not be grounded anymore,” Will said to the brunette, while Mike and Dustin continued their little spat.

She smiled and nodded. “Yeah. It’s really nice to see everyone again.” El looked around for a moment, her brow furrowing as she noticed a certain redhead was missing. “Well, almost everyone. Has anyone seen Max?” Will and I shrugged. She got no response out of Mike or Dustin. “Hey! Where’s Max?” she raised her voice loud enough to cut through Mike and Dustin’s bickering.

Mike turned to his girlfriend and shrugged. “Who knows?”

Dustin looked at his wristwatch. Right as it changed from 8:19 to 8:20, the warning bell rang. He had programmed his watch to perfectly match the school’s bell system. “She’s never this late,” he pointed out after the bell finished ringing.

“Should’ve guessed she wasn’t gonna show,” I said, frowning. I unwrapped my headphones from around my neck and stuffed them and the attached wire inside my backpack.

El frowned too, realizing Max might have taken things a little too far with her advice. “Maybe she’s already inside,” she said hopefully.

“Yeah, she might have hitched a ride with Billy,” Will speculated. “Her bike wasn’t at the racks.”

“If that’s the case, then there’s no use waiting out here any longer. Let’s head to class,” Mike suggested. We all agreed and started off toward the school building.

I found myself feeling a bit jittery as we headed toward the main entrance of Hawkins High, perhaps from the caffeine in the coffee I drank earlier. My fingers drummed at my thighs as I followed everyone. Mike and El went off ahead so he could walk her to class like he always did. I turned to Will, wondering if he was as nervous as I was, and caught him biting his lip, his eyes downcast. Perhaps he also had some reservations. “Will.”

He looked up at me.

“Everything all right?”

He flashed a wry smile. “Yeah… it’s just… we’re actually doing this, huh?”

I nodded. “Yeah, I guess we are.”

“You guys are gonna be fine. Don’t sweat it,” Dustin said, trying to cheer us up.

We nodded, and the three of us entered the building. As we started down the hallway, we blended seamlessly into the crowd of students. No one else paid us any mind, everyone too busy scrambling to get to class on time. Always one for punctuality, Dustin went off ahead, not wanting to be late. “Come on, Will! Let’s head to class.”

“I’ll catch up with you in a second!” Will shouted back at Dustin. He turned to me his voice softer now. “Try not to get too lonely in Spanish class, okay?” he said with a mixture of earnestness and sarcasm.

I smirked. “I’ll do my best. Good luck on your guys’s test.”

“Thanks,” Will replied. “I’ll um… see you at nutrition, okay?”

“Y-yeah… see you then,” I said awkwardly.

Will waved me goodbye and caught up with Dustin and the two of them hurried off to their geometry class they shared with Mike and Max. I watched them go, my thoughts dwelling on how unfair it was that Mike and El were able to kiss each other on campus while Will and I couldn’t even do so much as share a hug without potentially drawing more attention to ourselves. By comparison, our greetings and goodbyes here at school were always restrained and distant.

Shrugging off my disappointment, I continued onward to my Spanish classroom, doing my best to avoid eye contact with anyone. I had no friends in Spanish I. The class was a mix of freshman I didn’t know and some sophomores.

The beginning of the period wasn’t very notable. I took my usual seat in one of the middle rows just slightly left of the center. Señora Estevez started class promptly at 8:30 once the bell finished ringing, taking attendance first and then going over our homework. I refrained from raising my hand when she asked the class for the correct answers to the questions on our assignment, but took satisfaction in knowing all my answers were correct, despite the rush job I had done on it.

Some time later into our lesson on the preterite (past) tense, I felt a tap on my shoulder. My stomach fluttered. I didn’t really talk to anyone in my class outside of group exercises, so I wasn’t sure why the kid sitting behind me would want to get my attention in the middle of class. Fearing the worst, I turned around. The fellow freshman boy handed me a folded up note and shrugged when he saw my confused expression. _The note wasn’t from him, clearly, but who was it from and what was it?_ I wondered.

I unfolded the note and set it down on my desk. As I peered down at it my nostrils began to flare in anger. It read: “¿Eres tú un fairy? Circle Sí o No.” Below the note was a crude stick figure drawing of a boy with butterfly like wings. I heard a couple of boys snickering toward the back of the classroom, no doubt the ones behind the tacky note. Part of me wanted to circle “No” and send it back their way, but I was sure that it wouldn’t matter to them which option I circled, and I didn’t want to get in trouble for passing notes. Instead I quietly crumbled it up and stuck it in my backpack, remembering Steve’s advice about not allowing anyone the satisfaction of getting under our skin. I didn’t even turn around to determine the culprits, not wanting to draw any more attention to myself or let them see me upset. Attempting to make myself feel better, I tried to laugh off the note in my head. It was dumb for a multitude of reasons, but the one that stuck out the most to me was that they tried to write it in Spanish but didn’t know the words for “fairy” or “circling” so it became a pathetic Spanglish mess of a note. I also wasn’t sure why they even bothered to draw a fairy if that ugly stick figure was all they could muster artistically. That particular criticism was one I had a feeling Will might share as well, and I knew I would definitely be showing him the note at some point later in the day.

The nutrition bell couldn’t have rung soon enough. As soon as class ended, I darted out of the room as briskly as I could manage without looking like a complete doofus, not even bothering with the left shoulder strap of my backpack. I headed straight to my locker to store my Spanish textbook and workbook temporarily, which would help lighten the load I was carrying around, though my backpack was never as heavy on even days since I really only had two classes. My last period today was a study hall in the library for freshman athletes, which I shared with Dustin, Max and Lucas (but not El because for some reason our school didn’t qualify tennis as sufficient exercise to replace a traditional physical education class). It lasted only as long as I was actively on a sports team. Once the sport season ended, I would be placed in a regular gym class that same period unless I joined another team in the winter or spring. I was still considering doing track and field in the spring, so I would likely continue to have a study hall period in my schedule then. I really liked having it because it saved me a lot of time on my homework and allowed me to not always need to check out books from the school library since I was already there with access to all of them. I would often use the time to work on labs with Max and Dustin since we were all there together.

By the time I reached my locker, Will and Dustin were already there waiting for me. Before our breakup, my locker had been the usual hangout spot for us on even days because it was pretty close by to Will’s locker and to our Honors English classroom as well as not being too far away from Dustin’s geography class. Mike and El were off doing their own thing as per usual. They always slipped away during nutrition to have their alone time. The rest of us were used to it by now, so we didn’t really mind.

“Hey, Robert,” Will greeted me with a little wave.

“Hey guys,” I sighed, catching my breath. “How was your test?”

“Easy,” Dustin grinned. “Definitely aced it.”

“Not too bad. Shorter than I thought it would be,” Will added. “How was Spanish?”

His question presented me with the perfect opportunity to show them the note I received from my obnoxious classmates. Without hesitation I pulled the note out of my backpack, Will and Dustin watching me with puzzled expressions. I uncrumbled the note and presented it to them. “I think _this_ about sums up my experience,” I finally replied.

Dustin grabbed it from me and the two of them read the note together. Will immediately frowned, but Dustin started chuckling. “That’s gotta be the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said.

“Who gave that to you?” Will questioned me.

I shrugged. “A couple of guys sitting in the back of the room. I don’t know who. I just heard them laughing behind me while I was reading it. Didn’t bother turning around to look.”

“Good,” Dustin said. “Screw ‘em.”

“That really sucks you had to deal with that,” Will sympathized.

“It’s okay. Really. It’s actually kind of funny how pathetic this note is.”

Dustin snorted. “Yeah, like why’d those dumbasses even bother trying to write it in Spanish if they couldn’t commit all the way?”

“And that drawing… ugh,” Will grimaced jokingly.

We all laughed.

The three of us let out a collective sigh. Dustin and Will exchanged an earnest look. “Hey, you, uh, wanna tell him, or should I?” The curly haired boy mumbled to Will.

Will gestured for him to go ahead.

I raised an eyebrow and folded my arms. “Tell me what exactly?”

“So umm… turns out Max was already in class like we thought,” Dustin informed me. “We asked her what was going on between you and her.”

“And?”

“And it’s like you thought. She said she’s not ready to talk to you yet,” he said bluntly.

I stared at the floor in disappointment, putting my hands in the front pocket of my hoodie. “Figures.”

“We tried to tell her she wasn’t being fair to you, but you know how she gets sometimes,” Will added. Seeing my consternation, he looked at me with hopeful eyes. “I’m sure this will all blow over soon. Max is like one of the most loyal people ever. She’s not gonna abandon you. Not after everything she’s done for us.”

“Let’s hope you’re right,” I said.

Dustin’s attention was elsewhere. He was staring off slack-jawed at someone down the hall who was steadily approaching the three of us. “Hey guys, umm, don’t look now, but I think someone blonde and full of righteous anger is headed our way,” Dustin warned us, interrupting our tender moment.

Will and I of course turned around. “Crap…” he mumbled, catching sight of the cheerleader approaching.

Seeing the fury on Jennifer’s face, Dustin stayed quiet, hoping it wasn’t about to be directed at him.

Picking her first target, her cerulean eyes met mine, Jennifer Hayes marched right up to me, getting uncomfortably close. My body tensed up, and I gulped, preparing myself for a hail of nasty words trashing me for stealing Will from her (though I knew of course that that wasn’t even close to being true). I never believed I could be so intimidated by someone so much smaller and shorter than me, but here I was.

She reached her hand into her bag and pulled out my missing yellow rubber gloves from my costume. “Here,” she hissed, shoving them in my face. “You left these in my bathroom.”

My cheeks flushed. “Thanks…” I said, cringing with embarrassment. I took them from her and stuffed them in my locker.

“Jennifer, I’m really sorry… for everything,” Will tried to apologize.

Jennifer turned to Will, her eyes now daggers. Without a word, she took a step toward Will and slapped him across the face.

My mouth dropped open in shock as the three of us stood there, flabbergasted. Dustin in particular seemed awestruck by the fierceness of her action. Will meanwhile cupped his newly reddened left cheek.

A chorus of oohs filled the hallway. People, lots of people, were staring at the four of us. My stomach dropped, and the skin on my arms and back started to itch. I writhed around in discomfort as I tried to scratch myself. This attention was the last thing we needed right now.

Jennifer’s demeanor suddenly shifted. She seemed calmer and pleased with herself even. With a playful smile she turned her attention to Dustin, now ignoring Will and me. “Come on, Dusty-Buns. Why don’t we pick up where we left off on Halloween?” She grabbed his hand and started to pull him away from us.

“Yeah… sounds good,” Dustin replied, utterly spellbound by the blonde tugging at his hand. “Guess I’ll see you guys at lunch,” Dustin called out to us as Jennifer dragged him away, leaving Will and me alone at my locker. The people nearby who’d been watching turned away now that the conflict died down and resumed their own conversations with their friends. Though I was sure some of them would be talking about what they witnessed, I breathed a sigh of relief that their eyes were finally off of us.

Standing side by side we watched the newly formed couple disappear down the hallway. Will’s fingers slid across his cheek.

“What just happened?” I asked out loud, still trying to process our bizarre encounter with Jennifer.

“Karma, I guess,” came Will’s reply.

I tuned toward him, staring at his cheek. “You okay?”

Will turned to face me, smiling wryly. “It stings a little, but I’m fine. Honestly, I’m surprised she didn’t berate us more.”

“I think that slap definitely spoke volumes,” I replied with a chuckle.

“Wow, quite the scene Dustin’s new girlfriend made,” we heard a familiar raspy female voice call from behind us. Will and I spun around. It was none other than our second favorite Scoops Ahoy employee Robin Buckley. I almost didn’t recognize her without her sailor uniform.

The two of us were caught off guard by her sudden appearance. “It’s, umm… kind of a long story,” Will replied, attempting to dismiss her comment.

“Let me guess: you stupidly went on a date with her because you were pretending to be someone you weren’t, and she later found out you were already with someone else at the time?”

Both of us were stunned by her apparent knowledge of what happened. “W-wait, h-how did you…” Will stammered.

She smirked. “Let’s just say I know a lot about pretending to be someone you’re not. Speaking of which, you know how you two are like this?” Robin held up her right hand and crossed her index and middle fingers. “Well… me too.”

Will and I just stared at her blankly. “What?” I asked.

“Huh?” Will scratched his head. Neither of us had a clue what she was talking about.

Robin appeared a little flustered now. “Okay, umm... let me rephrase that. You know how you two both ...” Robin began to cautiously look around in every direction to make sure no one was in earshot. The coast was clear. “... like boys?”

“Look, I don’t know what you’ve heard, but we didn’t do anything in the bathroom at her party! We swear!” I immediately blurted out in a panic, though thankfully not loudly enough for other people to hear.

Will shot me a disapproving look. “Robert…” he grumbled.

“Of course not. Relax. But it’s still true right? That you’re a thing?” Robin whispered. “I swear, I’m gonna murder that dingus if he lied to me,” she said a bit louder, her hand balling into a fist.

There was only one person I knew she normally called a dingus. “Wait, Steve told you about us?” I questioned her.

She nodded. “He sure did. So, it’s true then?”

“Yeah, it’s true,” Will confirmed softly. I nodded. I had no issue with her knowing about us. Though I admittedly didn’t know Robin all that well, I’d had enough interaction with her at Scoops to know she was a trustworthy person. After all, she had cooperated with Steve to help sneak us into the Starcourt Cinema multiple times. She had even done it herself once or twice when Steve was absent.

Robin sighed with relief, it now confirmed to her that Steve was telling the truth. “Cool. Me too,” she said hastily.

Will’s brow furrowed. “Me too, what?”

“I’m also like you two.”

“You like boys?” Will asked her, still lost.

She shook her head in frustration. “No!” she yelped without realizing how negative that sounded. She rambled on, her voice now closer to a whisper: “I mean, I don’t hate boys. I like boys, as friends, but I really like… I really like… girls.”

That last word was the hardest for Robin to get out. Staring down at the floor, she let out a deep sigh, amazed at herself for actually saying she liked girls out loud for the first time. She hadn’t even explicitly said it to Steve when she came out to him on the floor of the movie theater bathroom Saturday night.

Our eyes lit up. I could hardly believe it. Will and I weren’t alone in our queerness anymore. Robin was right. She was a lot more like us than I could have possibly imagined. “Whoa,” we both exclaimed with burgeoning excitement.

“That’s awesome,” I grinned.

Robin scoffed. “Not exactly the word I’d use to describe it, but thanks anyway.”

“It is awesome though,” Will argued. “You know what this means, right?”

“That now we can form our own little queer club?” Robin joked.

“It means none of us are as alone here in Hawkins as we thought. Maybe there’s more of us around — hiding. Too scared to share who they are with anyone else like we all once were,” he speculated.

“Look, don’t think I’m about to start broadcasting it to everyone now just because I happened to find you two,” she maintained.

“Believe me, we’re not either,” I reassured her. “It’s just really nice to know we’re not alone anymore.”

Robin looked at us fondly, her lips curling into a smile. “Yeah… it is nice.” The end of nutrition bell rang. Her smile faded. “I better go. I’ll… umm… see you guys around, okay?”

“Yeah, sure,” I replied, disappointed our conversation was being cut short. I still had so many questions for her.

“See you around,” Will waved as Robin continued on past us.

A brilliant idea suddenly hitting her, Robin spun back around to face us when she was about twenty feet down the hall. “Hey! Why don’t you guys come over to Scoops after school so we can chat _s’more_? My treat!” she hollered at us.

Though her dessert pun was horrible, it still put a dopey grin on my face. “I’ve got cross country, but I’ll be there right after!” I shouted back with glee. My homework would have to wait because there was so much catching up and bonding to do with our new friend.

Will beamed. “Count me in too!”

Feeling downright giddy, Robin strutted onward, merging into the stream of students traveling in the same direction down the hallway. _Steve was right_, she thought to herself. _Things are getting better_.  
______________________________________________________________________________

_Mondays freaking suck_, Max decided as she stood in the lunch line. She hated the food choices in the cafeteria on Mondays. Her choices were either a plain prepackaged turkey sandwich or some monstrosity that approximated meatloaf but clearly wasn’t. She always chose the former. Every now and then she would consider bringing her own lunch from home. _Next week_, she’d promise herself. But it never happened because she would always end up choosing to suffer the lackluster lunch choices if it meant a few extra minutes of sleep in the morning.

The other thing she hated about Mondays was how her teachers all seemed to think their students had nothing else to do on weekends and would therefore pile on extra homework that was always due either then or Tuesday, depending on the period number. The workload had been even heavier this past weekend, given the extra day. But while both those reasons had crossed Max’s mind as she waited in the lunch line, her main reason for despising this particular Monday was the fact that she was now forced to be in contact with all of us again after she had made the conscious choice to avoid me and the rest of the party by proxy at all costs over the long weekend.

Thus far, she had done a pretty good job of avoiding interaction with any of us. Somehow she had managed to persuade Billy to give her a ride today, and when she arrived on campus, she made sure to steer clear of the party’s usual meetup spot — the bike racks. For the durations of her math and English classes she had largely kept to herself, especially in the latter. Much to her annoyance, Dustin and Will had pestered her during the former about when she was going to talk to me again. In turn she had told them to screw off. Oddly enough, Mike hadn’t even attempted to speak to her during either class. He’d probably figured out by now he was the last member of the party that could possibly hope to make Max change her mind.

The entire month of October Max had stuck her neck out for me after I exiled myself from the party, been there when no one else had been, and had gone out of her way to settle her differences with Mike and work together with him to get Will and me back together. And I repaid her with yelling and hitting. She knew why I overreacted. She’d put too much trust in her assumption that no one would catch Will and me in the bathroom while it was left unguarded and the door left unlocked. Leaving the door unlocked had been an intentional part of the plan she’d made with Mike. If Will had been allowed to lock the door, he would have had to open it for us and would most likely have refused when he discovered I was on the other side, ruining everything. Max regretted not telling us she was leaving us alone and not returning to let us know she was going off to help Jack, which would have given us a chance to relocate somewhere we could continue our conversation uninterrupted, somewhere less compromising. This oversight bothered her greatly. Her perfect plan had not been so perfect after all. While she was obviously glad to see it still worked out, it came at a worrisome cost.

So she took the three-day weekend as a vacation from the party, a vacation from helping others. El was right, Max had determined. She did need some time for herself away from the party and its myriad of problems. While Max thrived on helping others and being a voice of common sense for all of us, the events of Halloween night made her recognize that perhaps she was a little too concerned with others’ problems and not enough with her own. For example, while I wasn’t aware of it at the time, her stepfather had been acting especially toxic toward her recently. The day Max had cut her hair short like Molly Ringwald, Mr. Hargrove had called her a “dyke,” and went on a small tirade about how she wasn’t “womanly enough.” Though he hadn’t laid a finger on her like he regularly did with Billy, Max feared the day he drank too much and decided to cross that line. Out of pure self-preservation, she had learned to stay out of her stepfather’s way as much as possible and be as polite as possible when forced to be around him.

It had been a quiet and relatively uneventful three days for Max, other than her secret escapade with El to the mall on Friday. There she had bought the white marled turtleneck sweater she had worn to school today. That mall trip had been both girls’ only respite from a long boring weekend of sitting alone at home. But boring was good, refreshing even.

When not lying in bed reading Wonder Woman comics, trying out new skateboard tricks on her street, or working on homework, Max had spent a number of hours wondering what she wanted to do about Jack, whom she had learned from me liked her. El had suggested Max give the tall curly haired boy a chance. She wasn’t necessarily opposed to it, but things had become more complicated when she and Lucas had distantly exchanged a look on the street after everyone evacuated Jennifer’s house, one that she understood meant he still cared about the party and her. She’d considered biking over to Lucas’s house over the weekend in an attempt to reconnect with her ex for the first time since their breakup at the Starcourt Bowl. Mostly she wanted to know why he’d gone out of his way to help Will and me after all this time. That look they exchanged gave her a glimmer of hope that maybe he’d be interested in reconnecting with the party — with her. But while a part of Max still loved Lucas, ultimately she decided against visiting him. He’d broken her heart once, and she was hesitant to try and let him back into her life again.

Now Max was on the lunch line being served her plain prepackaged turkey sandwich on white bread, a far cry from the pizza slices she had come to crave almost every other lunch period during the week. She had taken extra care today to get in that line well before Jack normally did so that she could catch him before he sat down at his usual table with his dull group of friends. Having every few seconds or so scanned around for the lanky runner, she eventually spotted the lanky runner waiting in line just short of the first food station.

After she paid for her lunch, she lingered by the pay stations to wait for Jack, ready to have a little fun and see where things went with him. While she waited, she searched for a vacant table. There were quite a few left, since it was still early in the period,

“Jack!” Max called out immediately after he finished paying for his lunch.

He caught sight of the redhead eagerly approaching him and immediately tensed up. “Look, if you’re gonna chew me out, just know I really do feel awful about what happened.”

Max scrunched her face in confusion. “What are you talking about?”

Determining that she somehow must not have known what happened at practice on Friday between me and him, Jack eased up a bit. “You know… at the party… when I drank too much and got sick.”

She raised an eyebrow and snorted. “I mean, sure I’ll have the image of you puking on Jennifer’s lawn burned into my mind forever, but it’s really not a big deal. Don’t sweat it.”

He chuckled nervously. “Okay. Cool. Thanks.”

“Hey, you see that empty table over there in the corner?” She pointed to the table she had been eying a few minutes prior.

Jack peered at the table where she was pointing and nodded. “Uh huh.”

I was thinking maybe you and I could sit there today, just the two of us,” she offered.

“Uhh... yeah. Sure. Why not?”

“Awesome. Come on.” Carrying her lunch tray, Max strutted through the lanes of lunch tables toward her table of choice, Jack following closely behind. Once they reached the corner table, the two sat down across from each other.

“So, how was your weekend, Jack?” she asked, leaning a bit over the table toward him.

He frowned and let out a resigned sigh. “Pretty lame. My parents yelled at me for getting drunk, and now I’m grounded for the whole month.”

“Damn. That blows.”

“Yup. How was yours?”

“Boring. Really boring.”

“Is that a new sweater?” Jack wondered, taking notice of Max’s white marled turtleneck sweater.

She nodded and stretched her arms out a bit to show it off. “You like it?”

“Yeah, it’s… really pretty,” Jack said, blushing.

She smirked, exhaling sharply through her nose. “Thanks.” She unwrapped her sandwich, spreading the plastic wrap out underneath it like a little placemat on her lunch tray.

After a brief uncomfortable silence between the pair, Jack spoke. “So uh, I noticed you weren’t at practice on Friday.”

“Yeah, I skipped,” the redhead replied casually before taking a bite of her turkey sandwich.

Jack was caught off guard by her blasé attitude surrounding the topic. “Why?”

She swallowed her bite. “I mean, it’s not much of a three-day weekend if we still have to run anyway, right?”

Jack scratched his head. “Yeah, I guess so.” Another moment of silence passed. The lanky runner swallowed and took a deep breath. “Max…”

She gazed up at him.

“I was wondering…” He cleared his throat. “I was wondering…”

Max continued to stare at the boy, waiting for him to go on. Based on how nervous he looked, she could hazard a pretty good guess as to what he was about to ask her. “What?”

Looking right into her attentive blue eyes, he exhaled, his lip quivering a bit. Jack wanted to tell her how he felt, but something inside him wouldn’t let him. It nagged at him, made his throat dry and his palms clammy.

She started to lose her patience. “What?”

He glanced down at the table for a second and then looked back up at Max. “I was wondering why you’re sitting with me instead of your other friends.”

Max chuckled a bit nervously. That wasn’t at all what she thought he was about to ask. “Because I wanna sit with you and not them, doofus.”

Skeptical, Jack raised an eyebrow. “Is that _really_ the only reason?”

Max sighed. “Okay fine. If you really must know, I’m also kind of avoiding Robert right now.”

“Wait, you too?” Jack blurted out without thinking. Immediately regretting his words, he covered his mouth.

Her features hardened. “Jack, what did you mean by that?”

“I’m, uh… not allowed to hang out with Robert anymore,” he admitted sheepishly.

Max looked entirely confused. “What are you talking about?”

“My parents… Sharon told them he’s a queer, and now they’re forbidding me from talking to him.”

She could hardly believe her ears. “They’re _forbidding_ you?” Max repeated his words incredulously.

“Yeah, they threatened to pull me out of Hawkins High and transfer me to some private school in Indianapolis if I continue to be friends with him,” he explained.

She blinked. “So what? When I first met Lucas, my brother didn’t want me hanging out with him, but that never stopped me. In fact, it only made me want to hang out with him even more.”

“I don’t wanna leave this school. I like it here. I have to do what they say.”

“Like hell you do. Their threats… they’re bullshit. They’re trying to scare you, Jack. Good friends, friends like Robert, are worth fighting to keep. No matter what.” 

Her own conviction surprised her. Here she was actually defending me to Jack after she had spent the whole weekend wanting nothing to do with me.

“The damage is already done, Max. I told him at practice on Friday.”

Max gasped, realizing that this must have been the reason I had tried to call her late Friday afternoon. Immediately she felt a strong pang of guilt for ignoring me all weekend and not being there at practice on Friday to diffuse the situation. “What the hell, Jack?! They didn’t have to know! They didn’t have to know you were still friends with him!”

Jack shook his head. “I couldn’t risk it. I’m sorry, Max. I really am.”

Completely disgusted, she scoffed and stood up, slinging her backpack on her shoulder. She picked her orange juice carton up off her tray and skirted around to Jack’s side of the table. “To think I’d ever go out with a coward like you…” Max dumped the contents of her juice carton over Jack’s head. She squeezed the carton empty and tossed it onto Jack’s tray.

Paralyzed by shock, Jack peered up at her, his mouth agape and his soaked blonde curly hair dripping with orange juice. Some kids at neighboring tables took notice and began to point and laugh at him.

Leaving the dejected and humiliated runner behind, Max stormed off, her newfound guilt guiding her to her next destination.

Meanwhile at our lunch table, Dustin was coyly bragging about how he and Jennifer snogged during nutrition and that she gave him her phone number. Apparently they were also going on a date to Benny’s Burgers tonight.

Will was propping up his chin with his elbow on the table. “Well, at least she’s moved on, I guess,” he commented, sounding wholly uninterested. He was sitting next to me and across from El Mike, and Dustin.

“Does this mean she’s gonna start sitting with us?” Mike asked Dustin. He had always been wary of outsiders joining our party, and Jennifer was no different.

Dustin scoffed. “You kidding? She practically hates Will’s and El’s guts. And she’s not exactly the biggest fan of Robert either.”

El hung her head low in shame. She still wanted to make things right with her, but wasn’t sure when or how.

“You’ll probably start seeing a little less of me at lunch, but don’t worry, I’ll still stop by every now and then,” he added.

“So why aren’t you sitting with her now?” I questioned him from across the table.

“Cause then I wouldn’t be able to… shit!” Dustin exclaimed, staring off behind Will and me.

I gave him a weird look. “What?”

“Mad Max inbound, on your six!” Mike warned, pointing behind me.

I turned around. There she was, scowling as she headed directly toward our table, My stomach dropped. As she got closer, our eyes met. I immediately averted mine. Everyone else at the table stared at her silently, waiting to see what she would do or say.

She stopped just inches behind me. “Get up, Robert,” Max commanded, grabbing my arm.

I did as I was told. I could hardly refuse since she was practically pulling me up.

“Let’s go.”

Without a word, I grabbed my backpack, not knowing how long I’d be gone and left my lunch tray with my half eaten lunch behind. I shot my other friends a worried look and was met with a collection of perplexed faces. No one dared question Max.

Once my backpack was fully strapped on, she proceeded to drag me by the arm away from the party’s table.

“If she kills you, I call dibs on your X-Men comic collection!” Dustin quipped from behind us.

While I was way too nervous to react to his calling dibs on my comic books, Max flipped him off without even turning around, making Mike and Will chuckle. El remained silent as she watched the whole ordeal unfold, concerned about what was going to happen between Max and me.

Once we exited the cafeteria, I finally mustered the courage to speak. “Where are we going?”

“Someplace quiet,” she replied curtly. She continued to drag me down the hall not slowing down for a second.

She made a hard right as we turned toward the entrance to the library. She pushed the door open with her free hand, and continued to guide me past the front desk and around the reading tables to a secluded section in the far corner, away from prying eyes or ears. I already noticed a few weird looks from other students inside. Surrounded by tall book stacks and finally alone, Max let go of my arm, facing me directly now.

Before I could open my mouth, I was met with a slap to the face, not unlike the one Will had received earlier. Wincing in pain, I touched my left cheek. I knew exactly what it was for, so I didn’t bother complaining. Suddenly I felt a warm embrace. Her arms were around me, squeezing me tight. Though a bit confused by her emotional whiplash, I hugged her back.

“I’ve missed you, dickhead,” she admitted, choking up a bit.

“Max, I’m so sorry. I want you to know I do appreciate you and everything you’ve done for me. I really do.”

She sniffled. “I know.”

We separated. I sighed as a wave of relief washed over me. I knew now I had my best friend back.

“You know it’s probably a good thing I skipped practice on Friday.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I would have kicked the living shit out of Jack for what he did to you. Honestly I don’t know what you saw in him. He kind of sucks,” she admitted with a twisted smile.

We laughed. “By the way…” I started to whisper excitedly, “… you’ll never believe what happened earlier during nutrition.”

Sensing it was something good, she smiled as she waited for me to continue.


	6. The Gathering of Spies

The sun had gone down by the time Lucas arrived at the Wheeler residence. He had biked straight there from football practice. As he rode along the Wheelers’ windy driveway, the floodlights on top of their open garage served as a beacon guiding him toward his destination. Stopping just short of the garage, Lucas hopped off his bike and planted his feet on the ground. He took a long hard look at the white door straight ahead of him. Though it had felt like forever since he had seen it last, it was exactly as he remembered: same six rectangular window panels on the upper half and same brass knob on the righthand side. He let out a sigh and walked his bike under the roof the garage, parking it next to Dustin’s and Mike’s. Approaching the door, Lucas drummed his left fingers against his thigh as he used his right hand to knock on the door.

He didn’t have to wait very long before the door swiftly swung inward and he was face to face with Mike Wheeler. The tall raven-haired boy stared at Lucas for a moment. His eyes looked tired, like he hadn’t gotten much sleep, and his features were stern, not so much as smiling at the shorter dark skinned boy.

“Hey,” Lucas said, breaking the silence between them as they stood in the doorway.

“Everyone’s waiting downstairs,” Mike said, not bothering to greet him back. He stepped aside to allow Lucas to step inside.

“So, opening night’s coming up, huh? This Friday?” Lucas tried to make small talk as he followed Mike through the kitchen and toward the basement stairs.

“What do you care?” Mike replied coldly.

“I think it’s pretty cool that you’re in the play,” Lucas admitted, unfazed by his former friend’s dismissiveness. “You always did had a flair for the dramatic. I wish I could go, but I’m supposed to stay for…”

“The varsity game. Yeah, I know.”

“It’s the last game of the season. I have to be there… show my support. There’s always Saturday night, right?”

Mike turned around to face him at the top of the stairway. “Look, you don’t have to pretend to care about what I or anyone else in the party is doing. You’re here for one reason and one reason only, and that’s your connection to Ed and Todd,” he snapped.

Lucas recoiled a bit. Normally he’d argue back. The two of them had always been very good at that. But now, instead of defending himself, Lucas just shrugged it off and kept his mouth shut. He knew why he was here and that cooperating with Mike and the others was the best way to get back into their good graces.

Mike opened the door to the basement, and the two boys began their descent down the stairs.

“There he is!” Dustin shouted with glee. Out of everyone, he was the most excited to have Lucas around again. Somehow always falling into the role of mediator of our party, Dustin had kept the most contact with Lucas since his departure and had been the one to get him on board for the plan the four of them were about to enact.

Lucas peered down into the warmly lit basement and saw him and El sitting on the sofa below, ample space between the two. El had her bare feet up on the wood coffee table, which was littered with empty Yoohoo bottles and a Ruffles potato chip bag. The wall behind them had some of Will’s old drawings he had given to Mike years ago.

“Hi Lucas,” El greeted him, her lips curled in a slight smile.

“Hey guys,” Lucas waved back at them. “I was told there’d be pizza, so I came,” he quipped half-jokingly. “You guys didn’t eat it all already, right?”

“Yes, Lucas. We ate all the pizza, and El’s resting her feet on the invisible empty box right there in front of you,” Mike replied in a snide manner.

“Oh is that right next to your invisible manners?”

“Oh is that right next to your invisible manners?” Mike mocked him with a whiny tone.

“Don’t worry, Lucas. It’s on its way,” Dustin interjected, trying to dispel the boys’ quarrel. “But first, we’ve got work to do.”

Mike let out a sigh and settled down between him and El on the couch, while Lucas sat on the black leather ottoman across from the coffee table. Lucas and Mike glared at each other from their respective seats. Dustin looked around the room at everyone. The tension was palpable. “Hey, just like old times, huh? Searching for Will?” he remarked, attempting to lighten the mood by conjuring up a sense of nostalgia and camaraderie.

Though it had been a stressful time for all of us, Lucas couldn’t help but smile as he thought back to when we gathered in the basement two years ago trying to figure out what to do with El, who we had just found in the woods while out searching for Will. He recalled how El almost took her shirt off in front of everyone, the former lab rat blissfully unaware at the time of that being a social taboo.

Mike was about to shut down Dustin’s comparison, but El cut him off. “Almost. Robert’s not here.”

“Are they coming?” Lucas asked of Will and me.

Dustin shook his head. “Nah, they’re hanging out with Robin and Steve at Scoops.”

Lucas’s brow furrowed. “That’s… different.”

“It’s better they stay out of this,” Dustin continued. “The less they know the better.”

“Agreed,” Mike nodded.

“What about Max?” Lucas wondered.

“She umm… couldn’t come,” El replied clumsily. “Her stepdad… he doesn’t want her staying out after practice.” The truth was Max didn’t particularly want to be around Lucas at the moment, but El knew it was better to spare his feelings.

Lucas hung his head low in disappointment. “Of course.”

“We don’t need anyone else. El needs to be able concentrate if this is gonna work,” Mike tried to justify the redhead’s absence.

“Hey El, you mind moving your feet?” Dustin asked her. She obliged. Without further ado, the curly haired boy recklessly shoved aside the empty Yoohoo bottles onto the floor much to Mike’s annoyance and plopped last year’s Hawkins High yearbook on the table. “Mike and I snuck this out of Nancy’s room earlier,” he explained to Lucas. Opening the yearbook, he began to flip through the pages searching for the freshman class photos. Once he reached them, he spun the book around to face Lucas. “All right, you know Ed better than anyone else here. Find him.”

Leaning over the coffee table, Lucas pulled the yearbook closer to him and began to flip through the pages to find Ed’s photo. “His last name’s Fernández so he should be…” He reached the page with last names starting with “F” and quickly identified Ed’s photo in the middle of the righthand page. “… here,” Lucas pointed at it. He spun the yearbook back to face the three on the sofa so they could see. They peered down at Ed’s photo. The scrawny boy’s black hair was slicked back, the sides partially covering his ears. It was the same style he typically wore, and the same as it had been when he had dressed as Sonny Crocket from _Miami Vice_ for Halloween this year. His nose was flat and his skin olive in tone. Ed looked quite a bit younger in the photo since it had been taken more than a year ago by this point. Under the list of names to the right of the row of student photos Ed’s was in, his full name was listed: _Eduardo Fernández_.

“Eduardo,” El read his name out loud.

“I think his family’s from Spain or something,” Lucas explained.

“Are you guys really sure we should be doing this?” she questioned the group, very much aware of the moral implications of invading Ed’s room to dig up dirt on him.

“We have to,” Mike reassured his girlfriend. “For Will and Robert’s sake.”

Dustin and Lucas nodded in agreement.

“You ready, El?” he asked her, his voice gentler now.

Though she was still a little unsure about this whole thing, she wanted just as much as everyone else to help get the negative attention off Will and me, and there was no better alternative that had presented itself. Looking at her boyfriend, she nodded yes. She reached into her jeans pocket and pulled out a black blindfold. She wrapped it over her eyes and tied it behind her head. Mike meanwhile turned his boombox to a station with no signal to generate a radio static noise.

Concentrating, El shut her eyes to block out any potential leaks of ambient light that might peek through the edges of her blindfold. Soon enough, she found herself in the familiar pitch black of the Void, ripples forming in the shallow puddle at her feet.

El saw a plain white door with a sign saying, “KEEP OUT” in large black font and an orange background appear before her.

“What do you see?” Mike asked, all of them watching her intently.

“A white door,” El replied. “I think it’s his bedroom door.”

She stepped toward it slowly, grabbed the knob and turned it. The door swung open inward and to the left, making a faint creaking sound. Behind the door about ten feet in front of her was a boy with black hair hunched over at a desk scribbling something with a pencil.

“It’s him,” El confirmed. Cautiously she started to approach the boy to get a closer look.

“What’s he doing?” Lucas asked.

“He’s… drawing something.” Looking over his shoulder, she saw him shading a figure with a red colored pencil in a sketchbook. “It looks like… Spiderman.”

Mike, Dustin and Lucas all looked utterly surprised. “Is it any good?” Lucas wondered.

“Really good,” came El’s reply.

“No way! Ed’s an artist like Will!” Dustin remarked.

“And a total nerd!” Lucas grinned.

“Okay, he draws. That’s something we can work with,” Mike determined. “I know Will doesn’t let me or even Robert see everything he draws. Maybe Ed’s also got some drawings he’d rather not show the world. What else do you see, El?”

El concentrated on the emptiness surrounding her and Ed at his desk. Baby blue painted walls began to appear around her in puffs of colored smoke, filling in the space that made up Ed’s bedroom. She could see the whole room now: all the pop culture posters and drawings on his walls, his twin sized bed, his closet door, every knick knack. “His walls. They’re covered with posters and more of his drawings,” she observed.

“What kind of posters?” Dustin questioned her.

“Mostly superheroes, but also_ Star Trek_.”

Dustin smirked. “A Trekkie too? Jee-zus. How the hell does someone as nerdy as him end up hanging out with Todd Phillips, anyway?”

“He joined the team same time I did,” Lucas began to explain. “He’s our kicker. It was the only position he could play without getting totally clobbered, but he’s pretty good at it. I guess that kind of helped him earn Todd’s respect. But really, he’s a total kiss ass. He does whatever Todd tells him to.”

“I’ll bet no one else on the team knows just how nerdy he really is,” Mike guessed.

Lucas shook his head. “He likes to run his mouth a lot, but strangely he doesn’t talk about himself much… or ever.”

Getting down on her knees, El perused the console bookshelf on the wall adjacent to his bedroom door. “He’s got comic books too. Lots of them,” she shared.

“Probably where he pulls his inspiration from,” Mike concluded.

“You think pulling a couple of his superhero drawings would be enough?” Dustin asked Lucas. “You could threaten to show them to Todd.”

“No, I don’t think so. Besides, he could easily deny it,” Lucas countered.

“It’s gotta be something _really_ embarrassing. Something that would make him unable to show his face in school if it got out. It doesn’t even have to be a drawing. Keep looking, El,” Mike encouraged her.

Heading over to his desk, which was just left of his bed, El carefully maneuvered her arm around Ed to open his desk drawers, so as not to accidentally brush up against him and reveal her psychic presence in the room. She scoured through the drawers, searching for some solid piece of blackmail material. Nothing — just a bunch of school and art supplies and old homework assignments.

She next decided to check Ed’s closet across the room, opening the folding door to the left. It was a bona fide mess. Clothes haphazardly hung on hangers, some about to fall off, some already on the floor. Board game boxes lined the upper shelf of his closet. She tossed some of his clothes out of the way that were covering the plastic bins on the floor. Inside the bins were some old action figures and toys from his childhood that he hadn’t decided to part with yet, ranging the gamut from GI Joe to Darth Vader to Spock and more.

“He’s got some action figures. Like yours, Mike.”

Mike frowned. “What boy didn’t have action figures? Not good enough.”

“Maybe we’re wasting our time,” Lucas began to doubt this whole psychic safari into Ed’s bedroom. “Maybe there’s really nothing we can use.”

“No, there has to be something there. I just know it,” Mike asserted.

“If I were hiding something really embarrassing in my room, where would I hide it?” El wondered out loud.

“What about under his mattress? I’ve heard some people like to hide stashes of cash there, like for emergencies,” Dustin suggested.

“It’s worth a shot,” the pale freckled boy shrugged.

El got on her knees again and pulled Ed’s blanket and sheets away from the foot of his bed. Once the back of the mattress was bare, she lifted it up, separating it from the box spring underneath. She peeked between. Nothing. “I don’t see anything.”

“Check every corner,” Mike instructed her.

Getting frustrated and deciding it was too much work to keep lifting the mattress by hand, she used her powers to levitate the entire mattress in the air, letting it hover above the box spring. Meanwhile in the physical world, El’s nose began to drip with blood, the brunette still sitting perfectly still on the sofa in Mike’s basement.

“Wait, I see something,” El said, a hint of excitement in her voice.

“What is it?” Mike immediately asked.

“A sketchbook,” the brunette revealed. A spiral-bound sketch book with a forest green cover was resting on top of the box spring at the head of his bed under the area of the mattress where his pillow rested.

“Secret sketchbook under the mattress — that’s promising,” Dustin remarked.

“Or super creepy,” Lucas countered.

El used her telekinesis to float the sketchbook to her, letting the mattress down gently back onto the box spring once she grabbed it.

Sitting on the floor, she turned the cover over to reveal the first page. It was a drawing of a cartoon horse. She snorted.

“He draws cute ponies,” she giggled, shuffling through some of his drawings. “With big blue eyes and colorful hair. He named them too: Butterscotch, Blue Belle, Blossom, Cotton Candy…”

“Holy shit, El! You hit the jackpot!” Dustin hollered. “Our boy likes _My Little Pony_!” He doubled over laughing.

“What’s that?” El asked, confused.

It’s a television and comic book series about ponies, magic and friendship,” he explained.

“Erica watches it. It’s like super girly,” Lucas added.

Mike was grinning ear to ear. “Which makes it perfect blackmail material!”

“It’s not ‘girly!’” Dustin protested using air quotes. “In their latest adventure, the evil centaur team and Tirek turn Applejack into a dragon at Midnight Castle, and then Megan and the other ponies have to use Moochick’s magic to defeat his rainbow of darkness, saving them from a lifetime of enslavement. All the pink in the world can’t disguise the irrefutable fact that centaurs and castles and dragons and magic are all standard nerd tropes that we as D&D players can’t help but appreciate. Ergo, _My Little Pony_ is not just for girls, but for all nerds.”

Lucas crossed his arms. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure absolutely no one at school's gonna agree with the notion that _My Little Pony_ isn’t girly. And there’s no way in hell he’d want people to know he watches it, let alone draws characters from it,” Lucas refuted Dustin’s argument.

“Okay, don’t get me wrong. No one’s arguing that it’s not super embarrassing for a closet nerd on the JV football team to be a fan of it,” Dustin assured him. “I think we can all agree that labels definitely matter to someone like Ed.”

“Hang on, there’s another one here. This one’s tan with wings and a black mane. ‘Eduardo the Magnificent,’” El read the title above the drawing, which was written in a fancy style that replicated the series title font. “You guys think it’s supposed to be him as a pony?”

“A Pegasus pony,” Dustin corrected her.

Lucas gave him a weird look and rolled his eyes, unable to get over the fact that Dustin was a fan of the same show his little sister was obsessed with.

“That’s it! That’s exactly what we need! It’s got his name and everything!” Mike cried out excitedly. “El, you can come back now.”

El flipped through the drawings one more time before closing the sketchbook and putting it back where she found it, this time, not using her powers but just stuffing it under the mattress. She stood up and looked around Ed’s room one last time to consolidate its layout in her memory before removing her blindfold and bringing herself out of the Void and back into Mike’s basement.

After turning off the boombox radio, Mike addressed the group as El stashed her blindfold away in her bag, which was on the floor under the coffee table. “Okay, now that we know what we’re using and where to find it, it’s up to Lucas to infiltrate Ed’s room for real and steal it. So, what’s the plan, Lucas? How are you gonna get in there?”

Though all eyes were on him now, Lucas remained calm. “Don’t worry, I’ll figure something out by tomorrow.”

Mike frowned. “No, not good enough. We need to walk out of here with a solid plan. This whole thing… none of this matters if you can’t find a way to get into his room. As much as I hate to admit it, you’re our only hope.”

Surprised by Mike’s candidness and sincerity, Lucas was about to respond, but was interrupted by the door at the top of the stairs burst open. “MIKE! YOUR PIZZA’S HERE!” his mother’s voice bellowed from above.

“OKAY MOM! WE”RE COMING!” Mike shouted back.

They heard the sharp thud of the basement door closing again. “Mike, let’s eat and let him think it over,” El suggested to her boyfriend.

“I wholeheartedly agree with that notion. I’m starving!” Dustin said, casting his vote to eat before any further discussion took place.

All eyes were on Mike. Though not excited about prematurely adjourning their meeting, he was just as hungry as everyone else. “Fine,” he grumbled.

Everyone got up from their seats and eagerly headed up the basement stairs to grab some pizza in the kitchen. Secretly Lucas was glad to have some extra time to think things over before bullshitting a plan that might not be able to come to fruition. He had a few ideas, but nothing rock solid, though he wasn’t convinced there even was a rock solid plan that didn’t involve the potential risk of getting caught. If Lucas was going to enter the hyena’s den, he would need to be smart about it and not draw suspicion.


	7. The Apology

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger Warning: This chapter contains descriptions of assault and associated trauma.

While our friends were unbeknownst to us digging for blackmail material on Ed, Will and I were having a blast hanging out at Scoops Ahoy. Robin had kept her promise and let us help ourselves to free ice cream, which we more than took advantage of, both of us eating about as much as if the entire party had each ordered double scoop sundaes. As to be expected, we were so stuffed afterward that our stomachs were practically bursting at the seams. There was no way I was going to be able to eat a real meal once I got home.

All the while Will and I got to know Robin a lot more. She told us stories about various girls she had crushes on throughout middle school and high school, none of which panned out to anything more than wishful thinking or the occasional embarrassing moment where the other girl remained none the wiser. Will and I told her all about how we got together and even filled her in on all the Upside Down and supernatural stuff we’d lived through the past couple of years. Both of us had wholeheartedly agreed we could trust her, which meant a lot especially for Will, since he trusted very few people with his secrets. At first Robin thought we were messing with her, but Steve verified it all, even adding how he smacked the demogorgon with a spiked bat after coming to Nancy and Jonathan’s rescue, perhaps playing up his heroics a little past reality. Though she thought all of it was batshit crazy, she nevertheless had enough faith to believe us. If nothing else, her acknowledgment of the murkiness surrounding the published details of Will’s disappearance, Barb’s death and the whole Department of Energy coverup helped our case. Still, she made us promise to involve her the next time something Upside Down-related happened, so she could see it all for herself. Will in turn replied that he hoped there would never be another opportunity that would make him need to keep that promise, though he was sure El would be okay demonstrating her powers for Robin.  
______________________________________________________________________________

Going to school the next day was definitely easier. I slept better than the previous night. The first day back was always going to be the hardest, and now that it was behind me and nothing totally awful had happened during the school day or at practice, things seemed to be looking up.

The day was now Tuesday, November the 5th, an odd period day, which meant I had biology, geography, and geometry in that order. I could barely remember the last time I was excited for biology class. It was the period I had come to dread because I was forced to sit in the same room with Will for one and a half hours. Our breakup had quickly killed my excitement for that class, since Will had been my study partner and lab partner up until those last couple of days of September. Now that we were back together, and Max and I reconciled from the events of last Thursday, it was business as usual — well, mostly.

Lucas was already sitting his usual seat a couple of rows behind us when Dustin, Max, Will and I entered our biology classroom. And also like usual, he was still avoiding eye contact with us. Still I hadn’t forgotten his warning to Mike and El about Todd planning to humiliate us at Jennifer’s party. Not long before the bell rang and Ms. Chung started class, I turned behind me and looked back toward Lucas. He wasn’t talking to anyone, just minding his own business as he flipped through the pages of his homework, making sure there were no errors. I couldn’t help but pity him. He probably felt very alone because none of his newer more popular friends were in our class and none of us had wanted anything to do with him for the longest time. But things were different now. Lucas had seemingly changed.

It didn’t take long for Lucas to notice me staring at him. There was no sign of hostility or resentment on his face. His black eyebrows perked up while his lips curled into a sheepish smile. He flicked his wrist upward ever so slightly off his desk to wave at me. I couldn’t help but return the awkward but kind gesture. Our silent acknowledgement of each other marked the first time the two of us had directly interacted since he had interrogated me in the locker room about the incident at the pool months ago.

Will, ever so perceptive, caught the interaction despite being involved in a conversation with Dustin and Max. He waved back at Lucas as well. Besides, he was far enough away that it would have been a little weird. Despite no words being spoken between the three of us, Will and I could sense Lucas’s solidarity. Perhaps one day we’d all feel more comfortable actually speaking to each other again, but today was not that day.

Of course once Will also waved at Lucas, Dustin and Max couldn’t help but notice the source of our distraction. While Max merely rolled her eyes and told us not to bother with him, Dustin, on the other hand, was glad to see him re-engaging with us, even on as minimal of a level as this had been.

Once nutrition rolled around, Dustin wasted no time running off to hang out with Jennifer, leaving Max, Will and me on our own. Before we could head to our lockers to exchange our books, Lucas, who had been loitering nearby our classroom door like all of us had been after we got out of class, approached us. “Hey, umm, Max. Can we talk?” he asked her. Lucas was blinking a lot more frequently than usual, and his hands were fidgeting at his sides, all signs that he was nervous.

Max stared at him for a moment, eyeing him up and down. “Yeah, sure, whatever,” she replied. She couldn’t avoid him forever and a part of her actually did want to talk to him. She turned to us. “I’ll catch up with you guys later.”

Will and I nodded as she and Lucas left us to chat privately. Unlike in the classroom, Lucas did nothing now to acknowledge either of us.

The two exes snaked through the halls to Max’s locker. Max was in such a hurry that Lucas was practically chasing her.

“Max! Wait up!” Lucas yelped.

She ignored him. If he really wanted to talk to her, he’d have to wait until she reached her locker. She’d be damned if she’d have her nutrition wasted by Lucas slowing her down, and she needed to exchange her books.

Once at her locker, Max spun the combination lock and unlocked it. Lucas leaned against the locker just right of Max’s.

“Still using the same combination I see,” Lucas observed as she opened the door to her locker. “Would’ve thought you might have changed it after you dumped me so I couldn’t slip any apology notes inside.”

“Nope,” Max’s uninterested reply came as she pulled her biology textbook out of her backpack and stuck it inside her locker. She pulled out her geography book and slid it into her backpack.

“Your haircut’s totally awesome, by the way. It suits you,” Lucas complimented her.

Max shut the door to her locker and secured the lock. She glared at him now, her arms folded. “What do you want, Lucas?”

Lucas sighed. “Okay, I’m just gonna say it. I know I’ve been a real dumbass, and that I _massively_ screwed things up with you — with the whole party. I want you to know that I’m really, really, _really_ sorry about all of it, and that I’m trying my best now to do right by Robert and Will… but I also wanna do right by you. That look we exchanged on Halloween night out on the street… there was definitely a connection there. I know you felt it. Somewhere deep down, you’re still totally into me, and I can tell you right now that I’m still totally into you. So, what do you say, Max? How about we pick things up where we left off?”

Max uncrossed her arms and picked her backpack off the floor, slinging it onto her back. She dug her fingers under the straps against her chest and held onto them tight. “Look Lucas, I appreciate the apology, and I’m glad you’re trying to help them out, but my answer is no.”

Lucas sunk in place, his spirits crushed. “I don’t understand,” he stammered. “Isn’t this what you’ve been waiting for this whole time?"

“You broke my trust. You ditched and betrayed the whole party. I mean, come on. Did you really think you could just swoop in, say a few words and things would go back to the way they were between us?”

“I kind of hoped…”

“You really want the truth? Fine, I’ll admit it. Yeah, you’re right, Lucas. That look we shared did mean something. No matter how hard I’ve tried, and believe me I’ve _really_ tried, I just can’t seem to shake my feelings for you. But I also can’t trust you, and I’m not sure at this point whether that trust can ever be repaired.”

“Okay, not at this point. But maybe later down the road?”

“I’m not making any promises.”

“So it’s a maybe then?” Lucas hoped.

“It’s a ‘get out of my face now, or the answer’s gonna be _never_,’” Max threatened. She brushed past him, heading to the girl’s bathroom, where she knew she couldn’t be followed.

“Good to see you too,” Lucas muttered under his breath as Max marched away from him.  
______________________________________________________________________________

“It’s a little weird, right?” I said, my hands buried in my green hoodie’s front pocket as I watched Will stash his biology textbook away in his locker. We had already stopped at my locker first since it was on the way to his.

“That Max and Lucas are talking again? Yeah, definitely weird. You think they’re gonna get back together?” Will wondered, closing his locker door and clicking the stainless steel combo lock secure.

“Who knows?” I shrugged.

“Hey fairies! Miss me?” I heard an uncomfortably familiar voice jeer from behind us.

Will and I grimaced as we turned our heads to the sight of Todd and his friend Jamie swaggering over to us. I instantly recognized the latter from Jennifer’s party. He had dressed up as the Karate Kid and grabbed Will in an attempt to coax us into licking beer off the floor. Jamie was a total meathead. He was an offensive lineman, which meant his role was protecting Todd from the defensive line sacking him before he could throw the ball. In D&D terms, if Todd was a king, Jamie was the head of the king’s guard. And to play that position, you had to be a total unit, which Jamie definitely was. While Todd was lean but muscular, Jamie was broad and bulky. His longish hair, which reached down to the bottom of his neck was dark brown and wavy not unlike Steve’s hair, and his face and arms were tanned from spending multiple hours a day out in the sun during football practice. Jamie followed Todd around everywhere, the pair having been best friends since middle school.

They descended upon us too quickly for us to escape, Todd targeting me while Jamie targeted Will once again. They proceeded to pin our backs against the lockers.

“I couldn’t help but catch that little display in the hallway yesterday. Even Jennifer Hayes seems to think you two are a couple of disgusting fags,” Todd smirked.

“So Zombie Boy, did you enjoy sucking his cock or did Big Nose pay you to do it?” Jamie questioned Will. “I bet you Byers’s will do anything for money, seeing how you’re all poor as dirt.”

Seething, Will pursed his lips, trying his absolute hardest to not respond to Jamie’s hurtful comments.

My hands were balled into fists at my sides. “Leave him alone!” I spat.

“Oohoo! So protective. I think there’s your answer, Jamie,” Todd snickered. Jamie laughed with him.

“Hey Todd! I just overheard that Stacey wants to get back together with you and is waiting for you to make the first move, so why don’t you forget about those fags over there and go talk to her before she changes her mind?” Peeking around the two larger boys, I could see Lucas standing behind them with his arms crossed. Though I cringed a bit hearing Lucas refer to us as “fags,” I had to hand it to him. He was really committed to keeping appearances with Todd. If it wasn’t for our silent but amicable exchange before biology, I might have started to wonder if he was actually being serious.

Letting go of us, Todd and Jamie spun around to face their supposed friend. As though a switch flipped, a weirdly sunny smile crept across the former’s face. “Always looking out for me, huh Lucas?! What the hell would I do without you?” He stepped toward Lucas and gave him a solid pat on the back, Lucas looking pleased with himself.

Their bromance was a bizarre thing to witness. Lucas seemed to have gained Todd’s total respect. Somehow I doubted Todd let most people speak to him in the commanding way that Lucas just did. He was in deep with Todd’s crew. That was for sure.

The JV quarterback’s smile faded as he turned back toward Will and me and leaned in uncomfortably close to our faces. “You might as well admit what everyone else already seems to have figured out, ‘cause sooner or later, the truth will come out. It always does,” he hissed threateningly. He started to turn away, but then suddenly spun around and banged the locker door to the right of my head with his palm. Both Will and I jolted a bit, startled by the loud rattling right against our heads and suddenness of his action. Todd let out a chortle as he backed away and headed down the hall with Jamie and Lucas.

Finally Will and I were alone again. I let out a sigh and turned to him. “You okay?”

Will shrugged. “It is what it is. I mean, we knew it was bound to happen eventually.”

“It’s a good thing Lucas stepped in when he did.”

“Twice now he’s gotten them away from us,” he pointed out.

The end of nutrition bell rang. Both of us fell quiet as we waited for it to finish.

The activity in the hallway picked up, students beginning to walk with or part with their friends as they headed to class, locker doors shutting left and right. “Whatever the rest of the party’s planning to squash these rumors about us, all I can say is they better hurry up with it,” I said in a hushed voice close enough to Will’s ear so he’d hear me over all the chatter.

“I wish we could help them somehow.”

“Talking from experience, it’s better that we stay out of it,” I replied, thinking back to when I inserted myself into Dustin and Will’s plan for the latter’s date with Jennifer at the roller derby. Sure it probably would have failed regardless, but at least I wouldn’t have made things messier by causing Will to chase after me and leave Jennifer abruptly without explaining himself to her.

Will let out a sigh of his own. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”  
______________________________________________________________________________

As soon as I met up with Mike and Max for our geography class, I told them about our encounter with Todd and Jamie. Though neither of them were exactly surprised by it, they were still of course infuriated, and Mike promised me in a hushed whisper that they had dug up some dirt on Ed and that Lucas was going to follow through with extracting it as soon as possible. It was a small bit of relief in an already not so great day.

I found myself struggling to sit through my painfully boring geography class, my fist propping up my cheek and my eyes closing every few seconds or so, threatening to send me into a slumber. It didn’t help that the lights were turned off in the room to allow us to see the images on the slide deck our teacher was using.

Three classrooms over from us, Lucas had just received his graded geometry quiz. His teacher had passed them back to everyone after the class had completed some warm-up problems that were written on the blackboard. Lucas smiled to himself, having aced the quiz, as per usual. He was remarkably good with numbers and formulas, better than Will, better than Dustin. Only Mike was his equal in our party when it came to mathematics. But Lucas had opted out of honors geometry, deciding to limit the number of honors classes to one (Honors Biology) so his workload wouldn’t be too excessive his first year of high school.

Lucas peeked immediately to his right at Ed’s desk, curious what the secretly nerdy boy got on his quiz. _D_. He caught sight of the letter grade written in red ink at the top of the page just before Ed roughly stashed the quiz in the back pocket of his binder and closed it shut in frustration, as though he were attempting to banish it from his memory.

The sophomore had elected to sit next to Lucas from the beginning of the school year, as Lucas was the closest thing Ed had to a friend in third period. Ed would talk to Lucas frequently during class, much to the latter’s annoyance. They had even been forced to work on some group exercises together since they sat next to each other. Lucas had forced himself to tolerate Ed’s grating nature because he didn’t want to make enemies on his team. And when he overheard Ed calling Max a bitch and spreading nasty lies about Will and me, he really started to despise the guy. However, since finding out Ed kept his hobbies and interests hidden from his so-called friends, he started to feel a bit of pity for the guy, though that certainly wasn’t about to stop him from completing his mission. And Ed’s failing quiz grade gave Lucas an idea.

Ed let out an audible groan as he leaned back in his chair.

Lucas bit his lip. “Hey, Ed. You okay there?” he pried.

Ed turned to his left, meeting Lucas’s concerned look. “I’m screwed, man. We’ve got that test on triangles coming up Friday, and I just bombed this quiz big time. If I don’t ace that test, I’m gonna fail this whole semester, and my parents are gonna kill me. I don’t know what to do. I just can’t seem to get a grip on this whole Pitha-goraeum thing.”

“The Pythagoras theorem?”

“Yeah, that.”

“You know, I could help you study for it if you’d like. I did just ace this quiz after all… and every other one we’ve had so far. With my expertise, I’ll make sure you pass the test on Friday.”

“Really? You’d do that?”

The genuine shock in Ed’s tone suggested that no one had ever offered to help him like this before. _Had Ed ever even had any real friends?_ Lucas wondered. “Of course,” he replied to the older boy. “How does today right after practice at your place sound? Probably better to get a head start on studying, you know?”

“Yeah, sure. That works. Thanks man, you’re a real lifesaver, you know that?”

He smiled back at Ed nervously and flashed him a thumbs up. “No problem, dude.” Internally Lucas cringed. Despite his intense dislike of Ed, he couldn’t help but feel a bit guilty taking advantage of the sophomore like this. Still, Lucas really did intend on helping Ed pass their upcoming test on triangles despite his ulterior motives, so it was kind of a win-win for both of them. Besides, it wasn’t like he was actually going to expose Ed’s _My Little Pony_ infatuation unless the situation somehow became exceptionally dire.  
______________________________________________________________________________

_Thank God_, was all I could think when the lunch bell finally rang. Mike, Max and I wasted no time darting out of geography and hopping straight onto the line for the cafeteria as per usual. Today they had pizza slices, so Max was much more excited about the food choices than she had been yesterday. Once we got our food, we headed over to our table, where El and Dustin were already sitting, both of them having gone through the lunch line a bit ahead of us. Dustin had apparently elected to sit with us today instead of Jennifer. But weirdly enough, Will was nowhere to be seen.

“Where’s Will?” I questioned the pair already chowing down on their lunches.

Both of them looked up at me and shrugged. “I haven’t seen him,” El replied, a bit of pizza in her mouth.

“Maybe he decided to hop in the lunch line today,” Dustin took a wild guess.

“He never buys lunch,” Mike frowned.

“I guess I could check the line again, but I know I didn’t see him when we were on it,” I said, starting to feel a pit in my stomach.

“I’ll come with you,” Max decided.

Max and I put our lunch trays down on the table and hightailed it back to the cafeteria service counters. Looking around the line, I spotted Jack with his stupid mop of light brown curly hair being handed a couple of slices of pepperoni from the pizza counter.

“Don’t tell me you’re still hung up on that asshole,” Max said, noticing my eyes lingering on the lanky runner a little too long.

“I’m not. But geometry’s gonna be really awkward now that we’re no longer friends,” I sighed. “Did you really dump orange juice over his head?”

“Uh, yeah. Why would I lie about that?”

I chuckled. “You really know how to send a message, don’t you?”

“Oh, that was nothing, trust me. You should have seen El explode Stacey’s milkshake at the mall on Saturday!”

“She didn’t!” I cried out in disbelief.

“She totally did, and it was totally hilarious!”

Max and I cackled with laughter as we walked away from the area where Jack was and back further in the lunch line. Finally we reached the very back of the line, and just like Mike predicted, Will was nowhere to be found.

With no sign of him anywhere in the cafeteria, I grew more and more concerned over his whereabouts. “I should check the locker room,” I told Max as we stood in front of the open exit door. “That’s the last place he would have been before coming here.”

Max frowned, knowing she wouldn’t be able to come along, since it was a boys only room after all. “You sure you’ll be okay on your own?”

I nodded. “I’ll be fine. Besides, anyone I’d need to worry about is already in the cafeteria,” I assured her, looking out in the distance at Todd’s table where he, Jamie, Lucas, Ed, Stacey, and a bunch of other popular kids were sitting.

“Okay. Good luck.” She departed back to our table, leaving me on my own.

I exited the cafeteria, venturing through the eerily vacant hallways at a brisk pace until I reached the boys’ locker room. I wasn’t entirely convinced he’d be there, but it was the first place I could think of to look. And if he wasn’t there, I wasn’t sure where to look next. Maybe the AV room? Wherever he was, something wasn’t right. I could feel it in my bones.

Pushing open the door to the boy’s locker room, I was immediately hit with the all too familiar musty smell that was now made worse by the dampness of the air inside the room. The showers had recently been used, that was for sure. “Hello?” I called out. “Will?”

I heard the faint sound of someone whimpering. My heart immediately sank. It was him. It had to be. Tracing the source to the far back corner of the locker room, my fear was confirmed. I found Will sitting hunched over on the bench between the back row of lockers, his head drooped down toward the floor. He was still wearing his heather gray Phys Ed t-shirt for some reason, though he had put his medium blue jeans back on. Will sniffled hard, trying to prevent snot from dripping out of his nose.

“Will! What happened? What’s going on?” I demanded to know.

“N-nothing. I’m f-fine.” He wouldn’t look at me. Taking my backpack off, I sat down next to him on the bench and put my backpack at my feet. I peeked down at his face. His eyes were puffy. I could tell he had been crying for a while. I tried to put my arm around him to comfort him, but jerked it away when I noticed the back of his shirt had splotches of fresh blood.

“Will! You’re bleeding!” I gasped.

“I’m f-fine,” he repeated.

“You’re not fine. What happened?”

“It was an accident. I tr-tripped while r-running.”

I wasn’t buying it. There was zero chance he’d be holed up in the locker room crying if he had merely tripped. “Will, I need you to tell me the truth.”

“I am,” he stuttered.

I sighed. “Lift up your shirt.”

“No.”

No way was I taking no for an answer right now. Not when he’d been bleeding enough to totally stain his shirt. Though I definitely didn’t feel great about it, I reached behind him and pulled the back of his t-shirt up anyway to inspect his injuries. To my complete and utter horror, there was a whole swath of bruises and cuts along his back, mostly located around his spine. I cringed at the sight. “Oh my God…”

“I SAID NO!” he screamed at me, yanking my arm away. Losing my grip on it, his blood stained t-shirt fell back down to his waist.

“Somebody hurt you, Will! Somebody inflicted all those cuts and bruises on your back! I wanna help you, but… but I can’t if I don’t know what’s going on. You have to talk to me. Please. No more secrets between us. We’re in this together, remember?”

Will took a deep breath, “It was the end of class… and e-everyone was hitting the showers. I was showering in the far corner… l-like I normally do ‘cause I don’t really feel comfortable around the other guys. Then before I knew it, I looked up, and a bunch of them were standing around me n-naked holding their towels and giving me dirty looks. They started calling me all k-kinds of names and began to corner me. A-and then…” he stopped mid-sentence, quivering now.

“And then what?” I was almost too scared to ask.

Will finally looked up at me. I could clearly see how red his face was now. Tears were streaming down his face. “And… and then they started whipping me with their wet towels… over and over again. One of them said he wanted to see if the Z-zombie Fag could still bleed. I begged them to stop… but they wouldn’t. They just kept laughing and whipping me again and again, taking turns. It wasn’t until they all saw how much blood was s-streaming down my back that they finally left me alone.”

I shuddered, my mouth dropping out of sheer horror.

“I’ve never felt so… so humiliated,” he sobbed, drooping his head down toward the floor in shame.

My first instinct whenever he cried had always been to wrap my arms around him — try and comfort him— but I restrained myself now, recognizing how much his back must sting from the onslaught of wet towels. I didn’t want to cause him any additional pain. So, instead I grabbed his hands. “Hey, look at me. Look at me, Will.”

Will looked up at me again.

“We’re gonna get through this — you and me. Mike told me they found something on Ed, and that Lucas is gonna extract it ASAP. It’s all going to be over soon, I promise.”

“But what if their plan doesn’t work? What if people don’t care that Ed didn’t see us doing anything? What if you’re next?”

I was rendered speechless. I honestly hadn’t thought of that possibility. What if nobody actually cared whether he was telling the truth? Todd, Jamie, the boys who attacked Will — none of them seemed to care.

“I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” he whimpered.

“Tell me their names. The ones who did this to you. I’ll report them to the principal… or even better, we can have El teach them a lesson. They’ll think twice before ever hurting you again,” I said gravely.

Will shook his head. “No, you can’t tell anyone. It’ll only make things worse,” he protested.

“Things are already worse,” I countered. “We have to do something.”

“If it is gonna work… their plan… we can’t do anything that could sabotage it,” Will whispered vehemently. He grabbed my arm and began to stare intensely into my eyes. “Promise me, Robert. Promise me you won’t say anything about this to anyone. Not even to Mike.”

As much as I really wanted those bastards to pay, he was right that any direct retaliation on the kids responsible for hurting him would likely escalate things and mess up the plan to extort Ed and hopefully put the rumors about us to bed. I let out a sigh. “All right. I promise.”

He let go of my arm. “So, what happens now?” he asked me.

“We get you to the nurse’s office. Those cuts need to be cleaned up so they don’t get infected. Don’t worry. Everyone’s in the cafeteria now, so no one’s gonna see you.”

“You know I don’t like doctors and hospitals.”

“No doctors. No hospitals. Just the school nurse,” I assured him.

“What am I supposed to tell her when she asks what happened?”

“Whatever you feel comfortable with. As long as you’re being taken care of, that’s all that matters.”

“Robert?” Will sniffled.

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry I screamed at you. I’m glad you’re here.”

I flashed him a wry smile. “Me too, Will. I’m… uhh… sorry I lifted your shirt up without permission,” I said awkwardly. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

“You were scared,” he acknowledged. “I probably would have done the same if I found you bleeding and hiding your injuries from me.”

I was relieved to see Will acting a bit more like himself. I stood up and reached my hand out to help him up. “Let’s get you out of here, okay?”

Will nodded and grabbed my hand before slowly lifting himself up. He hissed a bit in pain. “It stings.”

“Your back?”

He nodded again.

“How well can you walk?”

“Well enough, I think. They whipped my thighs a bunch too, but my back definitely stings a lot more.”

“Fucking assholes.”

Will chuckled weakly.

“Where’s your other shirt?”

“In my backpack.” My guess was he knew his regular t-shirt would likely get ruined if he tried to put it on over his wounds, so he stashed it away. Will was always careful like that. He attempted to bend over to pick up his backpack now, but I stopped him.

“I’ll carry it.” I reached around him and picked it up off the floor, resting it on the bench for a moment while I picked up my own backpack.

“Thanks,” he mumbled.

“Of course.” I slung his backpack on my left shoulder and mine on my right, both backpacks a decidedly heavy load to carry. I looked around to make sure he wasn’t forgetting anything. I knew his jacket was in his main locker since he had stored it there before biology started, and he had already managed to slip on his jeans and sneakers before I arrived. It was like he had attempted to pack up and leave after everyone else vacated the locker room, but ultimately couldn’t bring himself to actually follow through with the leaving part. I didn’t know if I’d be able to either without help after facing that kind of pain and humiliation. With everything else of his accounted for, I slowly but surely led Will out of the locker room, and the two of us began our trek to the nurse’s office.

As we were getting close to passing by the cafeteria, Max suddenly burst through the entryway into the hall and intercepted us. “There you guys are!” she called out as she hustled over to us, putting her hands on her hips once she settled. “Thank God you found him! So you two coming back now or what?” Her brow furrowed upon further inspection of us. “Wait, why are you carrying Will’s backpack?”

“Will’s not feeling well, so I’m taking him to the nurse,” I explained to Max, trying to keep my wording as vague as possible. “You guys carry on without us. I’m gonna stay with him.”

Max frowned. I could tell she knew something was amiss and that I wasn’t exactly being straightforward with her. But ever since learning about Will’s Upside-Down related episodes last year after Will experienced one while out trick-or-treating, she had made it a point not to prod Will when he wasn’t feeling right. “Okay then… I guess I’ll see you both later. Hope you feel better soon, Will.”

“Thanks,” he replied, smiling a bit to make her feel better.

“Later, Max. See you at practice.”

“Yup,” she nodded solemnly.

Max retreated back into the cafeteria and we continued onward to the nurse’s office. On the way over, my stomach started to growl, quickly reminding me I hadn’t had a lick to eat yet. My tray containing two slices of pepperoni pizza, orange juice and a granny smith apple was still waiting for me at our lunch table, though the pizza was definitely cold by now.

But now wasn’t the time to think about food. I had one focus and that was staying with Will and making sure he got the appropriate medical attention. I began to seriously doubt he’d be able to go to his last class after everything that had just happened to him. He’d probably need his mom to come pick him up from school early, and with that, someone more currently with it at the moment than Will would need to explain to her how exactly he acquired his injuries, since Will almost certainly wasn’t going to. Though he was trying his best to put on a strong face now, I knew Will was really shaken up and not all there mentally, and therefore it didn’t feel right to place the burden on him. It had been hard enough for him to explain it to me. And while Will had made me promise not to tell anyone, his mom was a different story. There was no bullshitting Joyce Byers. She would accept nothing but the full and complete truth, and she certainly deserved to hear it. She was his mother after all. And hell hath no fury like Joyce Byers when someone or something gets in the way of protecting her son.


	8. The Extraction

Like he tried to do with me, Will played off his injuries to the nurse as purely accidental. He had merely taken a tumble on some loose gravel while running, he told her. Our school nurse Mrs. Mulligan was on the tail end of middle-aged with graying dark brown hair tied in a bun and a sharp but kind face. Age spots covered the pale loose skin on her arms and hands. After taking Will into the back room and examining his injuries, Nurse Mulligan, having held the position of school nurse at Hawkins High for over fifteen years, wasn’t exactly buying his story. She had heard every excuse in the book and seen enough bloodied and black-eyed students come into her office over the years to know better. She quickly determined based on the pattern of cuts and bruises on his back and thighs that the injuries had likely been inflicted by another person. And it didn’t take a psychologist to notice that Will appeared withdrawn and disturbed. Still, she kept her doubts to herself and did not contradict his explanation. That wasn’t her job. Her job was to examine, patch up and recommend further health care outside of school for students if necessary. And in this case, she thankfully decided it would be best for him to be sent home.

Leaving him in the back room for a moment, Nurse Mulligan came out to her desk to dial Will’s mom. Upon request I gave her the phone number of Melvald’s, where Joyce was currently working her shift. As I sat in my chair in the waiting area watching her explain to Joyce on the phone how Will had suffered some injuries during gym class and needed her to come pick him up, my stomach continued to growl. I really began to regret not grabbing even one slice of pizza from my lunch tray before setting out to look for Will.

I perked up when I overheard the nurse mutter something to Joyce on the phone about how she believed there was a chance Will might have been assaulted by another student despite what he had told her.

That possibility was all it took for Joyce to immediately drop everything and hightail it out of Melvald’s, which was currently on the brink of shutting its doors for good. The owner said he’d be out of business by Christmas, and the storewide clearance sale was already in full gear. Joyce was one of the few employees he had kept on, since he knew how necessary this job was to her family and because of her loyalty over the years, despite her occasionally neurotic tendencies. So while Mr. Melvald wasn’t excited about temporarily losing his only other employee currently working a shift, he really didn’t have any other choice than to let her leave and take her son home.

Joyce had driven like a maniac to get to Hawkins High as fast as she could, making sharp turns, cutting people off, and easily breaking the speed limit. Fortunately no police officer caught her and pulled her over, though if it had been Hopper, he would have likely only given her a warning upon hearing her explanation.

Once the nurse was done cleaning and bandaging Will’s wounds, she let him out to the waiting area, where he plopped himself on the chair next to mine and the two of us awaited his mom’s arrival. I had to imagine Will wasn’t all that excited about his mom finding out what happened to him. He didn’t say a word to me the whole duration of our wait, but when I asked him right after he sat down if he felt better, he nodded a bit, which gave me a small bit of comfort. Other than that, I was at a total loss for words. I’d open my mouth to tell him something, but no words would come out. I felt like if I had tried to talk to him about something totally unrelated, he was going to see through it as a way of distracting him, but at the same time it wasn’t like there wasn’t anything I could possibly say about his current situation that hadn’t already been said or that would erase or ease the emotional pain he was in. Though the physical wounds would heal soon enough, Will had been totally humiliated, and he’d have to carry those scars much longer. I felt so powerless to help him, and that powerlessness made me quite uneasy.

A couple of minutes after the end of lunch bell rang, Joyce finally burst through the door, totally frazzled and overcome with concern, which was only exacerbated when she rushed over to her son and saw Will’s sunken eyes and sullen demeanor. Immediately, she knew the nurse was almost certainly right that this wasn’t just some gym class accident. He had been like this before, totally out of it and shut down — when the mind flayer took control of his body. Joyce knew she needed to get the truth out of Will, maybe not right away, but whenever he felt ready to talk about it. Right now, she had one singular focus, and that was getting him the hell out of this office. After a brief exchange between the two women where Nurse Mulligan gave more details concerning the nature of Will’s injuries, the nurse wrote up a dismissal slip and had Joyce sign it, which excused Will from school for the rest of the day.

Joyce glanced back at Will for a moment, who was still sitting in his chair in the waiting area, before looking over at me. I stood up, figuring it was time to get Will out and to her car. “Thanks for looking after him, Robert. It’s… good to see you again,” she smiled at me wryly.

“Of course,” I replied. “It’s… umm… good to see you too.”

“Okay, Will, honey. Let’s get you home,” Joyce said, fidgeting a bit.

Will looked up at her and nodded uneasily. He grasped the arm rests of his chair to brace himself as he stood up.

“I can help you get his things to your car if you’d like,” I offered to Joyce.

Joyce put her arm around my shoulder. “That’s really sweet, but I wouldn’t want you to be late for class just so I don’t have to carry his books. Besides, you’ve already done so much to help, I wouldn’t want to burden you anymore.”

It was kind of an awkward situation. In truth, I had really wanted to accompany them so I could make sure Joyce left knowing what happened to Will in the locker room, but I definitely couldn’t bring that up here in the nurse’s office with Nurse Mulligan sitting right behind her desk. Then again, Will did make me promise not to tell anyone, and I pretty certain that included his mom. Even if it was technically the responsible thing to do, I’d have to accept that it just wasn’t my place to tell her. The onus was on Will, not me.

“You sure?” I asked her before shooting Will a worried look. Even though he was in good hands now, it was hard to part with him after what he went through.

“I’ll be okay, Robert. Thanks for… everything.” Will said shakily, attempting to reassure me.

I nodded my head. “Yeah… of course. See you tomorrow, then, Will.”

The bell rang again. I reflexively checked my digital watch. 1:20pm. _Shit_, I thought to myself. That was the start of Period 5 bell. I was definitely late for class now, and my geometry classroom wasn’t exactly right next door to the nurse’s office. Oh, and I still needed to stop at my locker to grab my geometry textbook first, like usual.

“Thanks again!” Joyce shouted as I bolted out the door.

I was about five classrooms already past the nurse’s office before I realized I might have been able to acquire a late pass from the nurse. _God damn it. Too late for that now_, I decided.

A few minutes of power walking through the mostly empty again halls and one small detour to my locker, and I finally made it to my classroom. I could hear Mr. Mundy going over the warm-up exercises from outside the door, my heart pounding in my chest all the while. I wasn’t prepared for the inevitable embarrassment of walking in late, everyone staring at me. I hated being in the spotlight. Part of me wanted to turn around and ditch class, perhaps try to catch up with Will and his mom. It didn’t make any sense, but at the same time it was hard to bring myself to care about finding the area of different kinds of triangles when Will had just been attacked. Nothing else really seemed to matter right now. Still, I knew I needed to go in. Besides, I had barely missed anything. Maybe Mr. Mundy wouldn’t even mark me tardy.

Sighing, I turned the door knob and pushed the classroom door open. I carefully stepped inside, the door closing on its own behind me. Immediately all eyes were on me, but as quickly as they glanced over at me, they shifted back toward Mr. Mundy and the black board in the front of the classroom. Mr. Mundy appeared unfazed by my tardiness. Ignoring me, he continued to address the class, as I awkwardly shuffled to my seat.

Unlike the rest of the class, however, Jack was still focusing on me, giving me a funny look — probably wondering why the hell I was randomly late to geometry class. As soon as our eyes met, he quickly averted his gaze, staring back at the black board like everyone else. _That’s right. Look away, Jack. No one asked for your judgment._

Approaching my desk, which was between El’s and unfortunately Jack’s, I noticed strategically laid out on top were a paper plate with two slices of pizza, an apple, and an orange juice carton. El was emphatically pointing at the food, a grin on her face. I could hardly believe it. I looked over at her in disbelief. She had really gone through the trouble of bringing my whole lunch sans cafeteria tray with her to class. I couldn’t help but smile back. Once I settled down at my desk, I leaned over toward El and whispered a brief but very gracious thank you before picking up a slice of cold pizza and taking a bite, munching as quietly as possible so as not to disturb my fellow classmates. Though the idea of sitting through geometry class today was even less appealing than usual with the awkwardness between Jack and me and the overall stress I was feeling surrounding today’s events, at least thanks to El I didn’t have to also go hungry. That girl never ceased to amaze me, though for someone with superpowers, that would probably always be par for the course.  
______________________________________________________________________________

The mission was a go. It felt kind of weird for Lucas, spying and sneaking around like he had done when he was twelve and there were bad men driving around in Hawkins Power and Light vans. However, this time was different. This mission involved deceit and thievery, and the stakes, while definitely lower this time (since the world wasn’t in any danger and Will wasn’t missing or possessed anymore), still mattered to Lucas all the same. He felt a personal obligation to complete this mission and right the wrongs of this past summer and early fall. Perhaps this was how he could earn Max’s trust back — how he could re-earn his spot in the party.

Lucas and Ed had just biked over to the latter’s house straight from football practice. Though it wasn’t even six o’clock yet, it was already dark out. Lucas hated this time of year for that reason — short days and long nights. He longed for those lengthy summer days when the sun wouldn’t set until after eight. He’d stay out all day hanging out with the party, going to the Starcourt Mall and Scoops Ahoy, to the community pool, hiking out in the fields and riding our bikes around — no responsibilities, no obligations. It had all been so nice, until it hadn’t been. For Lucas, everything had gone downhill after we discovered that creepy mansion in the woods.

He shrugged off his nostalgia for better times as the two boys parked their bikes and the sophomore led him into his small one-story ranch-style house.

“Try not to make too much noise. My dad’s taking his daily after work nap,” Ed warned the younger boy in a half-whisper right before they stepped inside.

As the pair crept across the living room, which was furnished with a mix of vintage and cheaper pieces, Lucas could see (and hear) the tan and burly mustached man snoozing away on the floral patterned couch. An orange safety vest and a hardhat were resting on the adjacent easy chair.

“Is it just you and your dad?” Lucas whispered to the older boy.

Ed shook his head. “No, I’ve got a mom and three younger sisters too. She’s got them over at Benny’s while she’s working her shift. Right now’s actually the quietest it gets all day around here. Usually it’s kind of crazy.”

“How old are your sisters?”

“Twelve, ten, and seven. They’re pretty annoying, especially the older two.”

Lucas smirked. “What a coincidence. I’ve also got an annoying ten-year-old sister. Erica Sinclair. I’ll bet they know each other.”

Ed shrugged. “I don’t think Isabel’s ever mentioned that name before.”

“Erica doesn’t have a lot of friends. She’s got her small crew of like four girls that she bosses around, and that’s about it.” While talking about his sister, it dawned on Lucas that he should probably contact his parents to let them know he wasn’t coming home right away. “Hey, can I use your phone real quick? My parents… they don’t know I’m here.”

“Yeah, sure. It’s in the kitchen. Just try not to be too loud.”

“Got it, thanks.” Lucas slipped into their cramped and disorderly kitchen. What limited countertop space existed in the room was littered with spice jars, packaged foods and dirty dishes, which overflowed from the pileup in the sink. He quickly located the phone hanging on the wall. It was hard to miss — banana yellow in color and an older rotary dial model, like the one the Byers used to have before upgrading to a button one like the Sinclairs and Wheelers had before them. Based on the size of Ed’s house, the old technology still lying around, and both parents working long hours (he knew construction was an early riser type of job), he surmised that the Fernández family must not have had much money. While Ed waited in the hall to give him some space, Lucas dialed his house and spoke to his mother, telling her he was studying at a friend’s house and promising her he’d be home in about an hour or so.

Once he hung up, the two boys approached Ed’s bedroom door, which was on the lefthand side at the end of the hallway. It was just like El had described — white with a “Keep Out” sign that had orange lettering and a black background. Ed opened the door and let him in. Stepping inside, Lucas immediately took notice of all the posters and drawings covering his walls, finally seeing them for himself.

“All these drawings yours?” Lucas asked, curious to hear Ed speak about his hidden talent.

“Oh, umm… yeah,” Ed mumbled, running his hand through his combed back black hair.

“Wow, I didn’t know you were an artist, Ed,” Lucas lied, standing around with his hands in his pockets as he admiring the older boy’s drawings.

Ed’s face flushed, his palms getting sweaty. He fidgeted uncomfortably. “I don’t know if I’d call myself that.”

“And a Marvel and DC fan. Rad, dude.”

He cringed and let out a groan. “Damn it. What was I thinking? I knew it was a bad idea to bring you in here. You must think I’m a total nerd now, huh?”

“What you are is super talented.” Lucas walked over to a picture of Wolverine and pointed to it. “I mean look at this one. It’s like comic accurate and everything.”

“So you don’t think I’m a nerd?”

“Oh, trust me, dude. You’re definitely a nerd, but who cares, right? I mean, I’m a nerd too. And I think it’s freaking awesome that you like all this stuff. My friends… my old friends… we were all obsessed with superheroes, Star Wars, D&D, you name it.”

“But we’re on the football team. We’re not supposed to obsess over comic books and sci fi.”

“Says who?”

“Says…” Ed stopped himself short and let out a sigh. “Look, are you gonna help me study or what?”

If Lucas had to hazard a guess, he would have guessed Ed was about to say Todd. But maybe that was a too narrow-minded line of thinking. Maybe it was just mainstream high school culture in general, funneling people into categories: jocks, nerds, artists, stoners, preppies, etc. It was a system only exaggerated and further perpetuated by popular movies, though one in particular that he had seen way back in January of this year sought to break these stereotypical barriers down, and had influenced Lucas’ own malcontent with his own categorization: _The Breakfast Club_. Here were a small group of kids who had been locked into various high school cliques or categorizations that only when forced together in a detention session on a Saturday learned they had more in common with each other than they would have otherwise realized. It was that film that had made Lucas believe he could be more than just an AV Club weirdo, that no one had to be only one thing. He could be a nerd and a jock if he wanted. And so could Ed, if he allowed himself to believe it.

“Yeah, right. Of course.” Lucas replied, setting his backpack down on the floor beside Ed’s bed. Ed meanwhile set his down by his desk and sat down on his wooden chair. They pulled out their math books and notebooks to begin working on their homework together. However, Lucas didn’t quite have his mind set on studying just yet. There was still the little problem of getting Ed out of his bedroom so Lucas could snoop around and extract his secret sketchbook. If it didn’t happen before they started working, he wasn’t convinced he’d have another chance later. He had to think fast if he was going to make something happen.

“Hey Ed, I’m a little thirsty. What’d you got to drink around here?”

Ed’s face flushed again. “Oh, jeez. Where’re my manners? I’m sorry, man. I should’ve offered you something right away. I don’t really have many people over, and…”

“You got any New Coke?” Lucas cut him off, not wanting to hear another one of Ed’s long winded explanations. _Holy shit, he’s pathetic_, he thought to himself. Still he couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. The sophomore must have had incredibly low self-esteem. His suspicions about Ed not having any real friends seemed to be confirmed. It certainly explained why he tried so hard to please Todd and fit in with his crew.

Ed gave him a weird look. “What? You actually like that stuff?”

“Don’t get me wrong. The original… it’s a classic. No question about it. But the remake…” He smacked his lips. “Sweeter, bolder… better,” Lucas said with a cheesy grin while sounding like a commercial.

“Screw that! Classic Coke all the way!” Ed disputed, looking totally repulsed by Lucas’s pitch. “And it’s all we’ve got, so take it or leave it.”

“Classic Coke it is then,” Lucas replied, his smile still present, though now warmer and decidedly less smug. He was pleased to see Ed actually passionate enough about something to hold his ground for once rather than trying to appease like he usually did around their circle of friends.

Ed got up from his desk chair and left the room to grab a couple of Cokes from his fridge, Lucas’s smile fading as Ed passed by him. He began to feel guilty as the full weight of what he was about to do to Ed dropped on him. The more he got to know Ed, the more he found himself pitying him and realizing maybe he wasn’t so bad after all. In fact, he was eerily similar to himself, a kid desperately trying to fit in with who he thought were the cool kids. Lucas’s brief glimpse into Ed’s life was almost like looking through a funhouse mirror, seeing a more distorted extreme version of his own insecurities. Could he really go through with this — with blackmailing him?

Hearing Ed stepping further away and into the kitchen, Lucas was running out of time. It wouldn’t take long for him to grab the soda and come back. It was a fairly tiny house after all. Though what he was about to do bothered him to his core, he reminded himself that Ed had still been the one responsible for starting the disgusting rumors about Will and me and therefore was definitely not blameless. _This is for the greater good._

Springing into action, Lucas hopped off the edge of Ed’s bed and carefully positioned himself on the floor to the right of the bed, his back against the carpeted floor. He lifted up the section of the mattress near the head of the bed with his left arm and reached underneath with his right hand. The mattress springs creaked a bit, and while not loud enough to draw attention, it was enough to make Lucas cringe. Any extraneous noise needed to be minimized to avoid suspicion. His hand deep under the mattress, his fingertips finally collided with a crisp flat edge. _Bingo._ Grasping it, he quickly slid the sketchbook toward him and pulled it out. It was the right one: forest green and spiral bound, just like El had described it. Setting the sketchbook down on the floor beside him, Lucas used both hands to slowly lower the section of the mattress he had been propping up back onto the bed frame.

Before he could check whether the “Eduardo the Magnificent” drawing was still in the notebook, Lucas heard the refrigerator door slam shut. Thinking fast, he reached out and grabbed his backpack, quickly stashing the sketchbook inside. Once he zipped up his backpack, Lucas shoved his backpack back where it originally was on the floor and like a ninja swiftly and gracefully repositioned himself back onto his seat on the bed.

Seemingly none the wiser, Ed re-entered the room holding a Coke Classic can in each hand, one for Lucas and one for himself.

Lucas flashed Ed another grin as the older boy handed him one of the cold cans, trying to look as innocent as possible. “Thanks, Ed.” He cracked it open and started to gulp his beverage.

“Yeah, no problem, man,” Ed replied casually, setting his own Coke can down on his desk with a small thud.

With the extraction of Ed’s sketchbook complete, there was no turning back for Lucas. He was fully committed to completing his mission, guilt be damned. Though it made him a little uneasy that he couldn’t immediately confirm the existence of the drawing in the sketchbook, he knew El was trustworthy, and the existence of the sketchbook under Ed’s bed and the accuracy of her descriptions of his room was enough for him to have faith it was indeed there. For now, though, he had to keep up the pretense of his visit to Ed’s house. Letting out an audible sigh after his refreshing gulp of Coke, the freshman opened his textbook to the unit on triangles, ready to begin their study session in earnest. “Okay, let’s get started.”


	9. Not So Bad

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a small bit of dialogue in Spanish in this chapter. I apologize if it's totally off! I used Google translate to help me out haha!

Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair were not pleased to see Lucas come home later than he had promised, especially since they and his sister were in the middle of dinner when he walked in. Lucas sheepishly took his seat at the kitchen table, being met with his parents’ glares and Erica’s smug grin.

“Oooooh. You’re in trouble now,” Erica teased her older brother.

Lucas ignored her, not wanting to cause a scene at the dinner table.

“Can you tell me what time is it right now, Lucas? What time does it say on that fancy digital watch I bought you?”

He glanced down at his Casio digital watch. The digits read 7:32pm. “7:32,” Lucas mumbled.

“I’m sorry can you repeat that?”

“7:32,” Lucas said louder. Erica snickered from the seat next to him.

“7:32? That’s funny. I seem to recall you telling me you’d be home by 7,” Mrs. Sinclair remarked.

“I kinda lost track of the time.”

“You lost track of the time. Now how does one manage to do that with such a nice easy-to-read watch like that? I’d really like to know.”

Lucas shrugged. Nothing he could say to her would have excused his lack of attention to the time while studying with Ed.

“Answer your mother when she asks you a question,” Mr. Sinclair cautioned him.

Lucas swallowed. “I… uhh… kinda forgot to check the time while we were studying.”

“Oh, you forgot, huh?” His mother dropped the sarcastic tone she had been using, her features hardening and making it blatantly clear just how angered she was. “We waited for you, Lucas! We delayed our family dinner just for you, and you can’t even bother to check your damn watch?!”

“I’m sorry, Mom."

“You better be sorry. The next time you come home late on a school night, you’re not getting any dinner and you’re grounded. You hear me, young man?”

“Yes, Mom.”

Erica snickered again.

“Something funny?” Mrs. Sinclair shifted her gaze toward Erica.

Erica’s smirk immediately faded. She shook her head fervently, “No, Mom.”

“That’s what I thought.” Mrs. Sinclair’s lips curled into a pleasant smile. “Well then, now that we’re all here, let’s dig in, shall we?”

After his family finished eating, Lucas grabbed his backpack that he had dropped off in the living room when he arrived home earlier and headed upstairs to his bedroom. Closing the door behind him, he proceeded to dump the contents of his backpack on his bed and picked up the green sketchbook he had stolen from Ed’s room. He sat on the edge of his mattress as he began to flip through the pages of _My Little Pony_ sketches, finally seeing them for himself. After a few pages of random magical ponies he didn’t particularly care about, Lucas saw it: the Pegasus pony drawing El had gone through all that trouble to uncover while in the Void and he had gone through even more trouble to acquire. Colored with pencils, it was the last drawing in the book; every page after it was empty, confirmed with a quick flip through. He read the title at the top of the page painstakingly written in the show’s logo font: “Ed The Magnificent.” He let out a snort, feeling a sense of self-satisfaction. _It just might have all been worth it after all_, he thought to himself — the lies, the thievery, his mom getting angry at him for being out later than expected.

Lucas set aside the sketchbook and grabbed his Supercom, which had been gathering dust sitting on his nightstand. He hadn’t used the thing in months. Taking the bottom of his red t-shirt, he wiped the dust off the device. Though Lucas knew the rest of their plan fell on him to execute, he still felt compelled to confirm to Dustin and/or Mike that he had completed his extraction of the blackmail material, and knowing Mike, the pale freckled boy would almost certainly want a progress report as soon as possible. Whatever happened with the actual blackmailing portion of the plan, this was still a victory in Lucas’s eyes, and he hoped it would gain him some favor with the two boys he used to call his friends.

After pulling the antenna up, Lucas pressed the talk button. “Dustin, Mike, do you copy? I repeat, Dustin, Mike, do you copy?”

Lucas’s voice came through a Supercom propped up on a desk right between a toy cymbal monkey and a can of Farah Fawcett Spray. Furiously scribbling a sentence for his English essay, Dustin let out a sigh, his train of thought interrupted by Lucas’s abrupt radio chatter. He grabbed the Supercom off his desk, pulled up the long antenna and pushed the talk button. “Yeah, I copy, Lucas. What’s up? Over.”

“I got it, Dustin. I got the sketchbook. Over.”

Dustin’s eyes lit up with excitement. “So, is it there? The drawing? Over.”

“Yup. And it’s just as embarrassing as I imagined. Maybe more. Over.”

The curly haired boy smirked. “Sweet…”

“So where’s Mike at, huh?” Lucas wondered out loud, not giving the other boy a chance to say anything more on the subject. He was curious as to why Mike hadn’t yet joined in upon hearing their chatter about the mission at hand.

“I copy, guys. I copy,” Mike’s voice finally came through. “Sorry I’m a little late to the party. I just got out of the bathroom, but I overheard that you got it.”

“Probably had to take a fat dookie, am I right?” Dustin chuckled.

“Eww, gross, Dustin,” Lucas grimaced.

“It was pretty fat, thanks for asking,” Mike quipped.

“Okay, I’m just gonna pretend I didn’t hear that,” Lucas replied, rolling his eyes. “So uh… now that I got the sketchbook, what happens next? Over.”

“We proceed to Phase Three of Operation: Snuff Out. Time to spring the trap and blackmail Ed. Make him admit he didn’t see Will and Robert doing anything in the bathroom at Jennifer’s Halloween party, over,” Mike instructed the JV athlete.

“And by we, you really mean me, right? Over,” Lucas made sure to confirm.

“Yeah, I thought that was pretty obvious,” Mike replied. “You’re the one who stole the sketchbook, over.”

Lucas’s stomach dropped. He had a feeling this was coming, but he wasn’t exactly excited about it, especially since he was now committed to helping the sophomore pass his geometry test on Friday. He couldn’t sour things between them just yet. “I don’t know guys. Do I have to do it right now? Maybe it can wait until the weekend? I kind of promised him I’d help him pass our geometry test on Friday, over.”

“Who cares about that mouth breather’s stupid test? Every day that goes by Will and Robert are in more and more danger. We need to snuff these rumors out now, over.”

“I care. Now that I’ve actually gotten to know him a bit, he doesn’t seem like that bad of a guy. He’s actually kind of nice, if not a little pathetic, over,” Lucas defended himself.

“_Nice_? After everything he’s said and done to hurt them? Are you shitting me, Lucas?!” Mike scoffed. “I knew it! I knew you’d find some way to screw this up!” he roared into his Supercom as he lay stomach down across his bed. “We should never have included you in this plan! You’re too close to the target.”

“Which was exactly why he was the only one of us that could do it, Mike,” Dustin reminded him while defending Lucas. “No one else would have been able to nab that sketchbook, over.”

“El could have! Over,” Mike insisted.

“Yeah, sure. By breaking and entering like some kind of psionic Catwoman. In case you forgot, her powers aren’t exactly subtle, over,” Dustin retorted sarcastically.

“Yeah, Mike. You even said it yourself. I’m ‘your only hope.’ This whole plan of yours… none of it would have been possible without me,” Lucas asserted. “And besides, I never said I’m not gonna do it. I’d just really prefer to wait until after his test on Friday, so I’m not still obligated to tutor him. Come on. What difference is three days gonna make at this point? Over.”

“Three days? Dude, that’s like forever in the rumor mill, over,” Dustin replied.

“Yeah, a lot can happen in three days, over,” Mike warned Lucas.

“Just today, for example, Will never showed up at lunch. Max said when she found Robert and Will roaming the halls late in the lunch period, Robert told her Will wasn’t feeling well and that he was taking him to the nurse’s office,” Dustin informed him.

“He ended up going home early too, over.” Mike added.

“That’s not so unusual,” Lucas shrugged. “I mean… he had all kinds of doctor appointments last year. Who knows? Maybe he caught a stomach bug or something? Over,” he suggested, trying to remain optimistic.

Dustin didn’t share Lucas’s optimism. “She also said Will looked really shaken up, like he had seen into the Upside Down again or something. I don’t know about you, Lucas, but I’m not buying that he was really just not feeling well. I mean, when has it ever been that simple with him? Something definitely happened. Something really bad. Either way, I agree with Mike. We can’t afford to wait any longer and let something else bad happen to either of them. You need to suck it up and call Ed right the hell now, give him the terms of our blackmail. These rumors end _tomorrow_. Over and out.” The curly haired boy swiftly pushed down the antenna on his Supercom and placed it upright back on his desk, not giving Lucas a chance to ask what exactly he was supposed to say to his teammate.

Mike and Lucas promptly shut theirs off as well, neither bothering to say any parting words to the other. Once he set his Supercom back on his nightstand, Lucas let out a heavy sigh, thinking about how crazy it was that he was actually about to blackmail someone. On the bright side, maybe he wouldn’t have to worry about helping Ed study afterward and risk getting in trouble with his mom again.

Before he could call, however, he needed Ed’s phone number. Lucas hurried downstairs to the kitchen, where his family’s copy of the school directory was kept.

“Still hungry?!” his mom shouted from the living room, where she and her husband were watching television.

“No, Mom! Just grabbing a classmate’s phone number!” Lucas shouted back to his mother as he flipped through the pages of the directory sitting on the countertop by the phone. “Homework question!”

That seemed to satisfy his mother’s curiosity, as she didn’t give a reply, too engrossed in whatever TV program she and her husband were watching. She trusted her son to get his homework done, since he had always brought home top grades on his report cards. After writing down Ed’s phone number on a notepad, Lucas took the pad with him back up to his room and dialed it on his bedroom telephone. As he waited for someone to pick up, Lucas twirled the coiled wire attaching the handset to the base with his left index finger. Ed’s sketchbook was sitting on his bed beside him.

“Fernández residence. Who’s calling?” The voice on the other end belonged to a woman with a somewhat thick Hispanic accent. Lucas could hear a lot of noise in the background, mostly children screaming and yelling. “¡Cállense!” the woman shouted at her kids, pulling the phone away from her face for a moment.

“Lucas Sinclair. I’m a classmate and teammate of Ed’s. I was just over at your house earlier helping him study math and wanted to check to see whether he still needs any help since I couldn’t stay very long.”

“Ooohh! Eduardo didn’t tell me he brought a friend over! That boy never has anyone over. Always going to other people’s homes, but never bringing them here. Between you and me, I think he’s embarrassed of us,” she whispered half-jokingly.

“Huh,” Lucas replied, not really knowing how to respond to that.

“Let me get him,” Ed’s mother replied. She left the phone off the hook and knocked on Ed’s door. “¡Eduardo! ¡Teléfono!” Lucas could make out her yelling in the background. “¡Dice que se llama Lucas Sinclair!”

“Lucas?” Ed’s voice finally came through. Ed had picked up the phone in his bedroom, allowing his mom to hang up the phone in the kitchen.

“Yeah, it’s me,” Lucas confirmed.

“Hey, this is gonna sound kind of weird, but did you happen to see a green sketchbook laying around my room when you were over here?”

“Is it kind of like a forest green color? Spiral-bound?”

“Yeah! That’s it! Where’d you see it? I can’t seem to find it anywhere.”

Lucas let out a chuckle.

“Why are you laughing? What’s so funny?” Ed demanded, totally bemused by Lucas’s seemingly out-of-nowhere chuckling.

He loudly ruffled through the pages of Ed’s sketchbook, making sure Ed could hear the sound. “It’s so fascinating…”

“What is?”

Lucas could tell the sophomore was growing more and more frustrated. “Why your obsession with _My Little Pony_, of course. You’ve got so many drawings here, but I think my favorite is the last one: ‘Eduardo the Magnificent.’ It’s… inspired.”

“You stole my sketchbook?!” Ed yelped. “What kind of asshole…”

“Listen to me very carefully, Ed,” Lucas cut him off, his tone more serious now. “Unless you want me to photocopy “Eduardo the Magnificent” and plaster it onto every locker at school so that everyone finds out just how much you enjoy shows about magical ponies, you’re going to do exactly what I tell you to do.”  
Feeling confused, angry and betrayed, Ed bristled at Lucas’s use of blackmail. “What? I don’t even watch My Little Pony. Those drawings you stole were a surprise I was working on for my sisters.”

Lucas scoffed. “Sure they were.”

“I swear!”

“Then why were you hiding them under your mattress?”

“So my sisters wouldn’t find them. They’re always snooping around my room. Why do you think I have a “Keep Out” sign on my door? Also, what the hell were you even doing looking under there?”

“Uhh… never mind that,” Lucas tried to dismiss the topic.

“No, I am going to mind that. What kind of creep looks under people’s mattresses?” Ed questioned him.

“What kind of weirdo stores stuff under there?

“Someone who doesn’t want their stuff found!” the older boy retorted angrily.

Lucas wasn’t getting anywhere with this, and it was beginning to frustrate him. “Look, even if what you said is true, and those drawings really are for your sisters and not part of your own obsession, do you really think everyone else at school’s gonna believe that?”

“No one would even know the drawing's mine,” Ed blew off Lucas’s threat.

“Oh really? Do you know any other Eduardo’s? Cause I don’t. And I’m sure Todd and everyone else on the team would love to hear all about your talents, which I of course can personally vouch for, having been in your room with all your drawings up on the walls and being in possession of your sketchbook with your name right on it.”

Realizing Lucas had him cornered, Ed let out a groan of defeat. “All right! All right! What do you want, Lucas?”

“Tomorrow at lunch, you’re going to stand up in front of everyone in the cafeteria and tell them all that you made up seeing Byers and his friend in the bathroom upstairs at Jennifer’s Halloween party and publicly apologize to them for starting fake rumors.”

“Wait, what? _That’s_ what this is about? You’re covering for a couple of fairies?”

Ed’s use of the term angered Lucas, making him grip the phone harder as he sat on the edge of his bed. “They’re not fairies! They’re my friends and you’ve made their lives a living hell!”

“Oh, so now you’re gonna turn around and make _my_ life a living hell by putting my drawing up all around school? Do you realize how much of a hypocrite you’re being right now?”

“If anyone’s a hypocrite here, it’s you. You made up disgusting rumors about people you don’t even know while you yourself are totally scared of people finding out you’re into nerdy stuff,” Lucas countered. “Imagine being terrified to go to school everyday because you knew you were gonna get mercilessly bullied and tormented by all your classmates and teammates over something completely out of your control. That’s their lives now, Ed. You did that to them.”

“I didn’t think it’d be that big of a deal!” Ed wailed. “I was drunk… and I guess I thought maybe I could impress Todd if I told him I caught them in there together. He’s always going on about fairies and how gross they are. It’s like some weird obsession he’s had ever since that day over summer break when we saw Zombie Boy and his friend at the pool. I just wanted to feel noticed, respected for once. Everyone on our stupid team’s always treating me like crap. Even you. ‘Oh, don’t mind Ed. He’s just the kicker. He’s not a real player. Ed, do this. Ed, do that. Hey twerp, when are you gonna get real muscles like the rest of us?’ I’m sick of being the whole team’s punching bag. That night at the party, I saw an opportunity… to be something more, and I took it. I knew Todd would finally give me the time of day if it was about those two…”

Ed’s observation about Todd’s fixation on “fairies” had piqued Lucas’s curiosity to the point that he wasn’t even paying attention anymore to what the sophomore was saying, missing pretty much everything after that particular observation. He started to question why Todd would be so obsessed with gays and with us in particular — why he seemed so eager to out us. Why did the quarterback care so much? What was it all to him?

“Lucas! LUCAS!”

Lucas snapped out of his funk. “Huh? What?”

Did you even hear anything I just said?!” Ed barked at the distracted younger boy before he could answer those questions swirling around his head.

“Sorry, I was, umm… thinking about something else,” Lucas gave him a half-assed apology. He didn’t really care much why Ed did what he did, only that he publicly rescinded his lies.

“Fucking hell, there you go proving my point right now!” Ed huffed. He took a breath. “Look, I don’t know what your friends were doing in that bathroom, but I know I saw both of them in there together. I may have been drunk, but I definitely didn’t make that up.”

“Robert got sick and threw up, and Will was helping him recover. That’s what they told you, but you decided they were lying and they had to be doing something a lot nastier. Drunk or not, Ed, you made a choice to hurt them. Now you have a chance to make another one — to right that wrong. And if you refuse, I guarantee you people are gonna start calling you fairy too if they think you like magical pony shows made for little girls, whether it’s really true or not. Maybe you’ll finally understand what you did to them once it’s done to you too.”

“Okay! Okay! I’ll do it. I’ll tell everyone I made it all up. Just please don’t spread that picture around!” Ed begged.

_Finally_, Lucas smirked to himself. “_And?_”

“And I’ll apologize to Robert and Will. But you have to give me my drawings back right afterward. My sisters are gonna be super upset if they never receive the surprise I promised them. Please, Lucas.”

“As long as you hold up your end, you’ll get your sketchbook back, pictures and all,” Lucas agreed.

“And you have to continue helping me study for that test on Friday so I pass this semester,” Ed added.

Lucas sighed, hoping Ed wouldn’t tack on any additional demands. “Deal.”

A brief moment of silence followed between the two boys, Lucas unsure whether he should hang up or say something more.

Ed was the first to break the silence. “I have to say, Lucas. It’s actually kinda admirable… the way you’re sticking up for them. Friends like that… I’ve, umm… always found them pretty hard to come by.”

A smile crept across Lucas’s face, the freshman genuinely surprised Ed was opening up to him in this way. “You know, Ed… for a loudmouth kiss-ass, maybe you’re not so bad.”

Ed snorted. “You’re not so bad yourself… for a blackmailing creep.”

“Touche,” Lucas quickly hung up the phone before things got too mushy between them. Hearing the line disconnect, Ed quickly followed suit.

Basking in his own success, Lucas pumped his fist while whispering “Yes!” out loud excitedly. The pressure put upon him had finally been lifted, a wave of relief now washing over him. He had done his part. As long as Ed followed through with their deal, whatever happened next was out of his hands. He grabbed his Supercom off his nightstand again, ready to share the good news with Dustin and Mike while secretly hoping this was his ticket back into the party.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Preview for Chapter 10: The Cafeteria Confrontation
> 
> Another day of school brings more grief for Robert and Will. While Ed has promised to tell everyone at lunch he made up seeing the two of them in the bathroom together (ideally exonerating them in the eyes of their classmates), the rest of the party begins to debate whether he will actually follow through or not and whether it even matters or not if he does.


	10. The Announcement

It was now Wednesday, November 6, two days before the opening night of Mike’s play. This week seemed to be crawling by at a snail’s pace, much to my chagrin. I just wanted it to end already, especially since we had another three day weekend coming up for Veteran’s Day, and the last couple of days had been an emotionally exhausting slog. Yesterday had definitely taken the cake for one of the worst days I’ve had in recent memory — Will had been attacked by a few classmates in the locker room and left bruised and emotionally scarred. I wished more than anything that I could have been there to stop his assailants, but I was grateful that I had at least been able to find and care for him afterward, bringing him to the nurse’s office to get his wounds treated and keeping him company until his mom arrived to pick him up from school early. As soon as I got home from cross country practice, I called his house to follow up on how he was doing. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make the trek over to his house to talk to him in person because I had too much homework to do and my mom wouldn’t let me go anyway since it was a school night. Nevertheless, he was happy to hear my voice, and I his. He told me his mom made him tell her everything and that she had predictably gone berserk once he did so. Will had begged her not to get involved and told her our friends were working on a plan to stop the rumors spreading around about us and hopefully reduce the chances of us being targeted in the future. Though Joyce had very reluctantly accepted his request, she assured him that if something like this happened again, she would not hesitate to skip over the principal and school board and head directly to the police whether he was okay with it or not.

With the bullying of Will and me becoming more frequent and progressively worse as the week dragged on, I feared what the next few days had in store for us. Today I went to school particularly on edge, constantly on my guard. I already knew Will wasn’t skipping today, something he had confirmed to me on the phone last night. Still, I wasn’t any less relieved to see Will with everyone else when I arrived at the bike racks earlier this morning. He looked a lot better than he had the last time I saw him, despite his hazel eyes still looking a bit haggard. He didn’t say much while we were all gathered near the bike racks, letting Mike, Dustin and Max do most of the talking, but that was pretty normal for him anyway. Since it was an even day, I had Spanish first thing. While fortunately no dumb questionnaires were passed to me in class today, I could hear those same boys who were responsible for the one on Monday snickering behind me every so often, and though I wasn’t a hundred percent sure, I had a strong hunch it was about me. I made sure not to turn around, doing my best to ignore them as I had on Monday. Though I managed to make it out of Spanish relatively unscathed, the day was still young. Nutrition always seemed to be eventful these days, and today would likely be no different.

One thing that was different about nutrition today however was that our whole party (besides Lucas, of course) was actually all hanging out for once. Usually Mike and El liked to do their own thing, but today they decided to join the rest of us. It wasn’t like this was the first time it happened, but ever since the schism in our party following my breakup with Will, I had gotten very used to smaller gatherings, so this was a bit of an adjustment. Dustin’s presence today was also unexpected given what he had told us yesterday morning at the bike racks.

“Hey merman, where’s your new girlfriend? Huh?” Max teased him. The six of us had gathered around my locker, which I guess made sense since it was in a pretty central location not too far away from everyone else’s.

“Yeah, didn’t you just finish telling us you were gonna start hanging out with Jennifer during nutrition from now on?” I asked.

“You guys didn’t break up already, did you?” Mike ribbed.

Dustin frowned. “No, we’re still together… for now.”

Will’s brow furrowed. “What happened?” he questioned the shorter boy.

“She took me to meet her friends, and things got… awkward,” Dustin confessed of his time with Jennifer during nutrition yesterday. “Somehow I forgot how much of a bitch Stacey Albright is. She and her cheerleader friends kept mocking Jennifer like nonstop. ‘First Zombie Boy and now Toothless? What is up with your taste in boys? Did he hypnotize you with some weird science gadget?’” he imitated the girls’ high pitched voices. “Like, I don’t give a crap what they say about me, but it makes me so sick to my stomach the way they treat her.”

While the rest of us expressed our sympathy, Max merely rolled her eyes. “And you’re surprised by this how? Hasn’t it already been drilled into your skull by now that Stacey and her curly-haired clones are the actual worst? Why would you voluntarily subject yourself to that kind of torture?”

“I was trying to be a good boyfriend!” Dustin angrily defended his decision. “She thought if I met them they might warm up to me.”

Max scoffed. “Hah! In what universe would that ever happen?”

“Oooh!” El squealed. “Does that mean you guys are official then?”

“I mean, I think so, but it’s not like either of us have actually said the words girlfriend and boyfriend out loud to each other yet,” Dustin admitted.

“Then it’s not official,” Mike countered.

Will turned to Mike. “Who cares if they haven’t labeled it yet? They’re still dating.”

Mike, taken aback somewhat by Will coming to the defense of Dustin’s relationship status, didn’t bother arguing back.

“How did she react to it all?” I asked Dustin, trying to steer his story back on track.

“That’s the thing… I could tell she was uncomfortable, but she basically just stood there and took it all in stride.”

“Did you talk about it with her afterward?” El asked.

“Yeah, I did. She said she thought it’d be best if we hung out outside of school from now on.” Dustin let out a sigh. “I don’t know guys. I feel like… like she’s ashamed of me or something. I mean, why didn’t she stick up for herself?”

“If you were in her shoes, would you be willing to confront Stacey Albright, the most popular girl in our grade? It’d practically be social suicide,” Mike pointed out.

“Yeah, I would. And I thought Jennifer was also beyond caring about stupid things like popularity,” Dustin replied. “Hence her wanting to date me.”

“I take it you agreed with her suggestion?” Will assumed.

“Yeah, no shit. I wasn’t about to get into a big argument over it. Still doesn’t change the fact that it freaking blows that I can’t even hang out with my own girlfriend in school.”

“Now you know how we feel,” I pointed out.

Dustin scoffed. “What’re you talking about? You two literally hang out like all the freaking time! Sure you’re not doing like… couples stuff, but still.”

“I don’t think she’s ashamed of you, Dustin. I think she wants to protect you from them,” El observed.

“I don’t get why she hangs out with them anyway,” he complained. “She deserves so much better.”

“They talk crap behind her back too. El and I overheard them in Scoops the other day,” Max informed him.

“Of course they do,” Dustin sighed. “Maybe you could try talking to her, Max — girl to girl. Let her know just how awful they really are.”

“I think she already knows,” El said. “She was always venting to me in English about her group’s drama… before she started hating me.”

“I’m sure she’ll come around, Dustin,” Mike tried to inject some hope into the conversation. “I wouldn’t take it personally. I mean, at least she still wants to hang out with you, right? Who cares whether it’s around her ‘friends’ or not? I’m sure you’ll both be a lot happier without them around judging the two of you anyway.”

Dustin’s lips curled into a smile. “Yeah, you’re right, Mike. Thanks.”

Mike flashed a grin at the shorter boy and gave him a light pat on the back. “Sure thing, dude.”

Just then, we caught sight of Todd and about five of his goons including Jamie traversing down the hall toward where we were congregated.

“Oh great…” Max mumbled. “Here comes the douche brigade.”

As they drew nearer to us, all of them cupped the fingers of their right hands and shook their hands in front of their mouths back and forth while at the same time making obnoxious moaning sounds.

We stared at them pretending to suck on imaginary dicks with a mixture of astonishment and disgust. Once they had swaggered past us they started howling with laughter. Some other students in the vicinity joined in, pointing and laughing, though some of it was perhaps just directed at their offensive display rather than directly at Will and me.

Watching Todd and his goons’ mockery of our supposed sexual encounter in Jennifer’s bathroom brought me back to my cross country practice yesterday when my dumbass teammate Calvin approached me with a proposal:

_After leaving the boys locker room, where I had been careful to avoid lingering any longer than necessary, I hurried out to the field like usual to wait for Max and the start of practice. Before last Friday’s practice, aka the Worst Practice Ever, I had always headed out with Jack, with either him waiting for me to finish changing or me waiting for him. Though it wasn’t always consistent who changed faster, it was usually him. He was faster at everything it seemed: running, changing his clothes, solving equations, screwing up his chances with girls he likes._

_Waiting out on the field, I kept to myself, others on my team hanging around not far away, mostly boys at first, since they usually changed faster than the girls. But my solitude didn’t last very long. Before I knew it, Calvin, who I knew had been talking about me behind my back, or rather right ahead of me while we were running, was in my face now, looking all innocent-like. His buddy Brad was standing not far off watching us. _This can’t be good_, I thought to myself._

_“Hey, Robert,” the sandy haired sophomore greeted me with a weird smirk on his stupid face._

_“Calvin,” I acknowledged him plainly, folding my arms._

_“I’m curious. How much did you pay Byers to give you head?” he asked, trying to sound as genuine as possible._

_“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I fibbed, doing my best to keep my cool and not display any sign of anger._

_“Really? Cause everyone’s talking about it. I heard Byers even got beat up over it. Poor guy. Just trying to make some cash, am I right?”_

_It took everything in me to not immediately sucker punch him in the face. I turned to my side, averting eye contact. “Nothing happened. It’s just some stupid rumor.”_

_“Wait, did people get it backwards? Did he pay you to give him head?”_

_“No, I told you, nothing happened.”_

_“Okay, sure. Nothing happened. Byers probably couldn’t afford it anyway. You know I’m only bringing it up ‘cause I was wondering if you’d be interested in sucking my dick for some cash.”_

_I almost choked out of shock. “What?”_

_“Yeah, I mean, I’m sure I could pay you more than Byers did… or didn’t.”_

_It was immediately obvious to me Calvin was being facetious. There was no way in hell he actually wanted to pay me to give him a blow job. How gullible did he think I was? “You’re full of shit, Calvin.”_

_“I’m being serious, I swear. I’ll pay you. We could even do it after practice if you want. How much are you charging?”_

_“I’m not sucking your dick, so leave me alone.”_

_“Come on, man. What’s the big deal? You’re cute. I’m cute. I’m sure we’d both enjoy it.”_

_I spotted Brad snickering behind him. Calvin was really struggling to keep a straight face now._

_“He said no, Calvin, so back the hell off!” I heard Max bark at him from behind me. She had arrived from the girls’ locker room just in time._

_Calvin turned slightly to his left to face her as she approached us, crossing his arms in annoyance that she ruined his joke. “Why do you hang around this fairy anyway, Max? He’s such a buzzkill.”_

_“He’s not a fairy. He’s a human being, and a way better one than you’ll ever be,” Max retorted. She grabbed my hand and dragged me away. “Come on, Robert, let’s get out of here.”_

_“Whatever, fire-crotch,” Calvin shrugged off her dig at him._

_With that, she spun around, her eyes burning with rage. If I knew Max, I knew she was ready to march back over to the sandy haired boy and sock him in the face like I had considered doing just a minute or two ago. “Don’t,” I warned her, grabbing her arm this time. “It’s not worth it.”_

_Max let out a groan and proceeded to flip off Calvin and Brad, both of them just laughing in turn. Once we put some distance between us and them, she turned back to me. “One day you’re not gonna be there to hold me back, and that piece of shit is gonna get his,” she threatened._

_“As much as I would love to watch that, I’d much rather you not get suspended,” I replied._

_“Yeah, who’d watch your back if I wasn’t around, right?” she snarked._

_“It’s not that! I’d just… miss you, is all. Besides, I’m totally capable of defending myself from punks like him.”_

_She chuckled, as though not believing me. “If you say so, buddy.”_

_“Hey! I was doing just fine before you got there.”_

_“If by fine you mean slithering in discomfort while he propositioned you, then yeah sure.”_

_Finding myself with no good comeback at my disposal, I merely pouted my lips._

_Coach Collins blew his whistle, signaling the start of our practice._

The end of nutrition bell rang, giving us ten minutes to get to our next classes. Mike was the first of us to break sight with the jocks, turning toward Will and me. “Don’t worry guys, if all goes to plan, stupid crap like that’s gonna be a thing of the past.”

Max folded her arms and scrunched her eyebrows at Mike. “What exactly is this plan anyway?”

“It’s on a need-to-know basis,” he replied flippantly. “You missed out when you decided not to show on Monday.”

The redhead scowled. “Oh no, you are _not_ doing that to me again, Mike.”

“I used the Void to go in Ed’s bedroom and find dirt on him, and when I found something they had Lucas go extract it so he could blackmail him into admitting he made up the rumor about Will and Robert in the bathroom,” El explained eagerly in a hushed tone.

“Damn it, El…” Mike groaned.

“That’s your super secret plan? Blackmailing Ed?”

“Keep your voice down!” Dustin shushed Max. “That’s top secret information!”

“Sure thing, James Pond.” Max’s new name for Dustin combining his newfound love of aquatic sports and his Halloween costume elicited a few snickers from Mike, Will, and me. El couldn’t help but smirk as well.

“Who does he work for? MI-Fish?” I joked.

“Catch him in his latest thriller: _A View to a Spill_!” Will chimed in.

All of us except Dustin were busting a gut.

“Ha ha, very funny guys,” Dustin said, rolling his blue eyes.

“So who exactly is Ed admitting it to anyway?” Max questioned Dustin, still smirking.

“Everyone in the cafeteria today at lunch,” he answered in a matter-of-fact way.

I went white as a sheet. “Wait what? Will and I never agreed to that!” I turned to Will to make sure he was on the same page as me. He looked just as mortified if not more so.

“Everyone needs to hear it directly from the source. It’s the best way to put the can on this stupid rumor,” Dustin tried to assure us.

“I don’t know, guys. What if no one cares whether he made it up or not?” Will said, voicing his doubts about the effectiveness of their plan to someone other than me for the first time.

“Todd and the rest of his goon squad certainly won’t. In fact, I’ll bet they already know he made it up,” Max said. “It’s just fun for them to pretend like it isn’t.”

“As long as everyone knows it’s not true, that’s what matters,” Mike said. “And Ed publicly admitting it will definitely spoil Todd’s fun.”

Max turned to Mike and Dustin. “You do realize this whole plan is totally bogus, right?” Max said, ridiculing them. “I mean, come on. Do you guys actually believe Ed’s capable of magically making all of this crap surrounding Will and Robert go away all by himself? All you’re going to accomplish is embarrassing the hell out of them and making this whole thing an even bigger deal than it already is. The best thing you guys can do is ignore the rumors and wait for them to subside. Don’t give the bullies any more power than they already have. Trust me. I used to deal with crap like this back in my old school in Cali all the time.”

“We can’t just ignore them! Things have been…escalating,” I said, trying to be as vague as possible.

Will shot me a disapproving glance, making me immediately regret opening my mouth without thinking first. I couldn’t exactly help it, though. The idea of sitting idly by while people continued to hurt Will and harass the two of us unchecked frustrated me to no end.

“How so?” Mike raised an eyebrow at me. I had the sense he suspected something, which given yesterday’s events wouldn’t exactly surprise me.

“He means that we’ve been getting targeted more and more frequently as the week’s gone on,” Will interjected, attempting to cover for himself.

“Yeah like yesterday one of my teammates tried to proposition me as a joke before practice,” I shared an example. While Calvin’s proposition wasn’t exactly a huge deal to me personally (though it had been rather annoying), I figured it would steer the conversation away from potentially forcing Will to reveal his traumatic locker room incident.

“Gross” Mike grimaced.

“Mike, what does ‘proposition’ mean?” a confused El asked her boyfriend.

Dustin snorted, covering his mouth.

“It means he asked Robert to do naughty stuff with him,” Max explained for him.

“Like sex stuff?”

The way the word ‘sex’ rolled off her tongue so casually yet so innocently left Dustin guffawing, the curly haired boy unable to contain his laughter any longer. Admittedly the word had sounded quite strange coming out of her mouth.

“Yeah,” Max confirmed. “Like sex stuff.”

El cringed with disgust.

“You see, Max? This is exactly why something needed to be done,” Mike argued. “Neither of them should have to put up with that kind of harassment.”

“And while it may not be the best plan, it’s the one we’ve got and it’s better than nothing,” Dustin said once he had composed himself.

Max sighed. “Look, I get where you guys are coming from. Really, I do. But I’m telling you this plan isn’t going to turn out the way you think it is. You’re playing with fire and Robert and Will are going to get burned. I strongly suggest you find a way to call it off before it’s too late.”

“We can’t. It’s already out of our hands,” Dustin affirmed. “Unless one of us can get Lucas to intercept Ed before lunch, he’s going to make his announcement today.”

“It’s going to work, Max,” Mike asserted. “Trust us.”

“No, it won’t, Mike.”

“Yes, it will!” he snapped back.

“No, it won’t!”

“Yes, it will!”

“Guys, come on,” Will pleaded them to stop.

“No, it won’t!” Max ignored him. Everyone else’s heads swiveled back and forth between the bickering pair.

“Yes, it will!”

“No, it won’t!”

“Yes, it will!”

“STOP ARGUING!!!” El angrily shouted over them.

All of us turned to El, completely stunned by her outburst. Taking a deep breath, the brunette lowered her voice. “If it works, it works, and if it doesn’t, we’ll find another way,” she concluded, effectively ending the conversation. “I’m going to class. See you guys at lunch.” El started to leave but Mike put his hand on her shoulder to stop her.

“Wait, El! Don’t you want me to walk you?”

El shook her head. “There’s no time anymore. You wasted it with your stupid argument.” She shrugged him off and stormed off in a huff down the hall. Their bickering now must have bothered her a lot more than she usually let on.

“What’s gotten into her?” Mike wondered out loud once she was out of earshot.

Dustin pursed his lips. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe she’s sick and tired of her boyfriend and her best friend always arguing like a couple of whiny babies. And I don’t blame her. You two need to knock it off and learn how to get along already. It’s driving all of us crazy.”

Without another word, he hurried off to his next class, leaving only the four of us remaining.

“We should probably get to class too. There’s less than five minutes left,” Will pointed out.

“Yeah sure, let’s go,” Mike mumbled crabbily.

The four of us headed to our shared English class. With Max and Mike too miffed at each other to speak and Will and I unsure how to break the tension between them, our short trip through the halls was a very quiet and very awkward one. Mike and Dustin’s plan had brought so much unnecessary conflict within our party. Whatever happened with this plan of theirs, we’d find out soon enough. I had a feeling Mike might be being a bit overly optimistic about its chances of success because of how desperate he was to make things better for us. It was painfully obvious to me how much he hated seeing us get hurt. An attack on us was an attack on him, on his ability to protect us. Ever since we were little he’d always looked out for Will and me.

But at the same time I also didn’t fully agree with Max that it would necessarily make things worse to have Ed admit he lied to everyone. What did worry me, however, was the highly public nature of his upcoming announcement. Max had a point that it could be extremely embarrassing for us, and I was not at all looking forward to that. I wished there was a opportunity for me to tell Lucas to tell Ed to hold off on making it, that maybe he could find a better less public way to make amends, but with lunch coming up right after class and Ed constantly surrounded by either his teammates or other classmates, there was no opportunity available. Any intervention was out of my hands, just like this whole plan had been all along, which had of course been by Mike, Dustin and Lucas’s design.  
______________________________________________________________________________

My cheese ravioli, a dish which I usually looked forward to on Wednesdays, looked wholly unappetizing sitting in front of me right now. I had lost my appetite before lunch period, though truthfully I hadn’t had much of one at all today to begin with. I wasn’t sure why I had bothered going through the lunch line at all. Maybe I did it to keep some semblance of normality in a period I knew was about to be anything but. Maybe I felt like if I had food in front of me and everyone else was eating around me that I’d somehow gain my appetite back. Of course I should have known better. It never worked like that.

“Robert.”

Whoever it was trying to get my attention, I was too distracted to hear them — too busy agonizing over what was about to happen at any moment. I was considering just getting up and leaving, maybe going out to the football field and sitting by myself on the bleachers until the end of lunch, even though it was real chilly out. If Will decided to follow me, even better. Besides, it wasn’t like we had to be in the room for Ed’s announcement, right?

“Robert!”

This time I heard my boyfriend’s voice. It shook me out of my trance. “Huh?” I turned to my left to face Will, who was right next to me on the bench. His face showed concern.

“You okay? You’ve been twiddling your fork in your ravioli ever since you sat down.”

I could have been honest, or I could have pretended I was fine. My default had usually been the latter, but that night we were supposedly stuck inside Jennifer’s bathroom I made a promise to him that from that point on I’d be honest about my feelings, that I wouldn’t pretend like I wasn’t scared when I actually was. “No, not really,” I replied, telling him the truth.

“You nervous about Ed?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Maybe a little,” Will said with a shrug. “Whatever happens, happens. We’ll get through it. We always do.”

I nodded. Something about him accepting it all made me feel better about it too. Though the idea of the two of us absconding away from the cafeteria right now was still quite tempting, I thought better of offering up the idea. Will seemed determined to stay put and see this through, and a part of me couldn’t help but also want to do the same. And thinking more clearly now, I knew there was no way I could leave Will in here alone. Either we both left, or neither of us did.

“Don’t worry, Robert. The only person Ed’s gonna embarrass is himself,” Mike tried to assure me while harking back to the concern Max expressed earlier. “Have faith in the plan.”

“Jesus Christ! I wish he’d hurry up and get it over with already so you guys can stop talking about this stupid plan 24/7,” Max groaned, voicing her discontent with the subject.

Mike glared at her. “It’s not stupid!”

El rolled her eyes and sighed.

“Max, I swear to God, don’t respond to that!” Dustin interjected before the redhead could argue back, pointing a finger threateningly at her.

“Whatever,” she muttered, crossing her arms in disdain as she turned away from the rest of us.

Across the cafeteria, Ed was sitting amongst his teammates at Todd’s table, otherwise known as the popular kids’ table. It was a long table — frequenters included the usual suspects: Jamie, Stacey, Jennifer, and of course, Lucas, though the girls mostly sat at a different end of the table from the boys, allowing each to share their own gossip about the other. It was about a fifty-fifty mix of the most popular freshmen and sophomores. There were other tables nearby that the popular upperclassmen like Billy Hargrove, Michelle Hayes and Heather Holloway sat at. Those tended to be a lot more co-ed on average. Occasionally the upperclassmen and underclassmen would intermingle, especially the girls.

Growing weary of listening to the same old tired conversation about which girls his teammates thought were the hottest and what they wanted to do with them behind closed doors, Ed turned away, looking around the cafeteria nervously. He knew what he needed to do. He just wasn’t sure whether he had the courage to do it. He’d almost certainly be kicked from the table — standing up for a couple of presumed fairies. Not that he’d really miss it all that much. No one seemed to pay much attention to what he had to say anyway, no matter how many times he opened his mouth. And when they did pay attention to him, he was more than often the butt of a joke.

Ed’s chocolate brown eyes landed on Lucas, who was sitting across and a couple of people to the right from him. The dark-skinned boy was propping his chin up with his hand, staring out at nothing in particular. He appeared equally as bored.

Lucas, sensing Ed was looking at him, gave the older boy a slight but knowing nod, his expression serious but not overly severe.

Ed took the hint. It was now or never. Without warning he got up from his seat and stepped on top of his seat on the bench. This caused quite a bit of commotion at the table, everyone giving him weird looks. Ed cleared his throat. “Attention! Attention everyone! I’ve got something to say!” He called out to the cafeteria at large.

“Hey Ed, how’s the weather up there?!” Jamie mocked him.

“This oughta be good,” Todd smirked, the dirty blonde suspecting nothing.

Conversations at other tables began to die down as more and more students started to turn their heads toward Ed standing on the bench. “Listen up!” he exclaimed, waiting for more people to give him their attention.

_Oh God, this is it_, I panicked to myself as everyone at our table craned their necks to face him. In contrast, Mike and Dustin were practically giddy with anticipation. Max rolled her eyes at the overly eager pair. Will and I exchanged nervous glances before looking back at Ed.

Practically all eyes in the room were on the scrawny Latino boy now. The cafeteria was eerily quiet except for some hushed whispers and a few students pointing and gawking at him. “Many of you are, umm, likely aware of a rumor going around… about a couple of freshman boys, who I’m not gonna name, blowing each other in the bathroom upstairs at Hayes’s Halloween party last Thursday,” he addressed the sea of students.

“Zombie Boy and Big Nose!” Jamie jeered. His comment was met with a few snickers, particularly concentrated around his own table.

Ignoring Jamie’s rude interruption, Ed continued: “I want you all to know I’m the one who started the rumor. It was I who supposedly caught them in there. But the truth is… I made the whole thing up.”

Todd’s smirk was wiped clean off his face, replaced by a scowl. Lucas meanwhile kept a straight face, trying to appear neutral, though on the inside he was wholly proud of his new friend.

“I thought it’d be a funny joke. I thought spreading it would make me feel important. Heard. But really all it was was cruel. For those of you I hurt, for those of you I lied to only for attention, I’m truly sorry. I hope you’ll all forgive me,” he pleaded.

Across our table, Mike grinned, delighted his plan appeared to be working. El seemed similarly pleased. Her contribution had made a difference after all. Meanwhile Max, with her arms crossed and a scornful expression, did not seem as impressed with what had just transpired.

“Wow, his apology almost sounds genuine,” Dustin whispered to Will, sounding impressed.

“I think it is,” Will whispered back.

I couldn’t help but agree. I was shocked that Ed not only took care not to directly call us out like I had feared he would, but also seemed truly sorry for his actions. I had to admire his bravery as well. It took a lot of guts to stand up in front of everyone and admit he did something wrong, even if he was technically under duress. Perhaps Lucas really got through to him more than any of us had expected.

“Oh please, he’s just saying what Lucas told him to. You guys said it yourself, he was blackmailed,” Max hissed.

“Nobody cares, dork!” a senior boy shouted at Ed.

“Yeah, no one gives a shit about some dumb rumor! Shut the hell up and let us eat!” A junior girl chimed in.

While the girl’s comment sounded harsh, it actually made me feel somewhat better about this whole thing. If her opinion represented the majority’s, if most people were apathetic to this whole ordeal, than perhaps we didn’t have as much to worry about than I initially thought.

“You wanna know what I think?” a voice that I’d almost forgotten by this point cried out. It belonged to none other than Troy, our old middle school bully. After El broke his arm during the week Will went missing two years ago, he had mostly left us alone out of fear of the super-powered girl returning out of the woodwork to wreak more havoc on him, and with the start of this school year, that fear had been further exacerbated by her presence at school. “I think you secretly decided to join in with their fairy ways and now you’re trying to cover for yourself!”

The cafeteria erupted with “oohs” and a roar of laughter.

A bead of sweat dripped down Ed’s forehead. “No, no way! That’s disgusting!” he cried out with revulsion, shaking his head furiously in a panic. “I told you, I made the whole thing up as a joke! It was all a joke!”

“Jokes on you now, amigo!” Troy’s best friend James shouted back at him to even more laughter.

_Shit._ The tables had been turned on him, and us by extension. I started to wonder whether Max was right after all. Was his public exoneration of us only going to make things worse?

Lucas watched with dismay as the people he had called his friends for months cackled at Ed, not taking anything he said to heart. While he felt sorry for the sophomore, he knew he couldn’t say anything to defend him without drawing suspicion to himself. If this gambit had any chance of working, he couldn’t jeopardize it by allowing anyone to suspect a connection between Ed and himself. He glanced over at Todd, expecting him to be laughing alongside his teammates at Ed’s expense but instead found the quarterback staring intensely at Ed with an uncharacteristically dour and severe expression.

Without a word, Todd proceeded to get up from his seat, walk around to the other side of the table and yank Ed off the bench, much to Lucas’s horror. There were some audible gasps from a few students. Fortunately, Ed managed to land on his feet and didn’t completely fall over. He slowly cowered away as Todd stepped on top the bench where he had just been a moment ago.

“I would like to take this moment to share my perspective on the matter if you all don’t mind,” Todd began to address the crowd. His voice was more aggressive, more obsessed than his usual assured cocky-sounding one. “Now, it’s very possible Ed here’s telling you all the truth. Maybe it was all made up. A joke, as he called it. It’s also very possible he’s lying to your faces, covering up whatever disgusting acts happened in there, as one of you was sure to point out. You see that’s the problem with a liar like Ed: you never know when they’re telling you the truth and when they’re not. But as it turns out, it doesn’t really matter whether he made it up or not because the truth about the fags in question has already been staring all of us in the face, plain as day, and I for one think it’s about time we finally acknowledge it.”


End file.
